Jump-starting computational research: a sabbatical at EPCC

12 December 2024

Vanesa Magar writes about her sabbatical at EPCC, during which she focused on wind energy and meteorology projects using the Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (MPAS-A), the atmospheric core of MPAS developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA. 

I would like to thank everyone for a very pleasant and fruitful stay at EPCC. I remember my time there frequently and fondly. 

The year allowed me to jump-start the MPAS-A numerical model of the atmosphere that Markus Gross, my collaborator and co-founding member of our group the GEMlab, had initially configured as a forecasting model. 

Part of my work for the two years before my sabbatical year at EPCC involved designing, building, testing, deploying, operating and maintaining a network of five oceanographic buoys in the Gulf of Mexico. That project came to an end in December 2023, but being based at EPCC allowed me to focus better on other projects and move back to computational research. 

During the sabbatical, we succeeded in porting and benchmarking MPAS-A in the case of the idealised baroclinic wave for the global, quasi-uniform mesh configuration, up to mesh resolutions of 7.5km. We also succeeded in securing Seedcorn funding from NERC. This Seedcorn project involved several workpackages addressing current knowledge and software development gaps in:

1. In-house mesh generation code with jigsaw-geo. Lead: Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

2. Benchmarking of MPAS. Lead: EPCC.

3. Real test cases: winter storms and wind energy study cases. Lead: Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada (CICESE).

4. MPAS-3DPBL. Lead: DTU.

5. MPAS-GPU. Lead: EPCC.

6. MPAS-DA: DART or JEDI. Lead: Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada. 

The Seedcorn project will strengthen further the collaborations between EPCC, CICESE, and DTU, and in future we will pursue additional collaborations within Europe and the US as we endeavour to expand the network of colleagues and friends working on these and other topics involving atmospheric models.  

I look forward to continuing working with EPCC! 

Read more about Vanesa's research in this article: Taking a sabbatical at EPCC.

Author 

Vanesa Mager, Senior Researcher, CICESE
vmagar@cicese.edu.mx