Supercomputer Technologies as a Tool for High-resolution Atmospheric Modelling towards the Climatological Timescales

Estimation of the recent and future climate changes is the most important challenge in the modern Earth sciences. Numerical climate models are an essential tool in this field of research. However, modelling results are highly sensitive to the spatial resolution of the model. The most of the climate change studies utilize the global atmospheric models with a grid cell size of tens of kilometres or more. High-resolution mesoscale models are much more detailed, but require significantly more computational resources. Applications of such high-resolution models in climate studies are usually limited by regional simulations and by relatively short timespan. In this paper we consider the experience of the long-term regional climate studies based on the mesoscale modelling. On the examples of urban climate studies and extreme wind assessments, we demonstrate the principle advantage of long-term high-resolution simulations, which were carried out on the modern supercomputers.