What is it about?
This is the first exposition of the EPIC (Explicit Planetary Isentropic Coordinate) atmospheric model. The article describes in detail the algorithms and design choices that make up the model.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
To simulate a planetary atmosphere, often the starting point is an Earth model, which gets adapted to fit the chosen planet. In contrast, when a user starts EPIC, its first prompt is: "Choose a planet." In other words, the planet itself and all its attributes are treated as variables, and there is not a different version of the EPIC model for each different planet. This promotes the development of process algorithms that work well under a wide range of circumstances, and avoids special tuning to any particular planet, which can unintentionally mask important physics. The EPIC model also uses dynamic memory allocation, such that it does not have to be recompiled when switching to a different number of grid points or layers, or to a different planet.
Perspectives
The EPIC model and the MITgcm were both created in the early-to-mid 1990s, a few floors apart in the same high-rise building (the Green Building at MIT, which houses the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences). For perspective, this was during the period when there was excitement that CPUs would soon run as fast as 100 MHz (0.1 GHz).
Professor Timothy E. Dowling
University of Louisville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Explicit Planetary Isentropic-Coordinate (EPIC) Atmospheric Model, Icarus, April 1998, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1006/icar.1998.5917.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
