Department of Earth System Science

We describe the three-dimensional global stratospheric chemistry model developed under the NASA Global Modeling Initiative (GMI) to assess the possible environmental consequences from the emissions of a fleet of proposed high-speed civil transport aircraft. This model was developed through a unique collaboration of the members of the GMI team. Team members provided computational modules representing various physical and chemical processes, and analysis of simulation results through extensive comparison to observation. The team members' modules were integrated within a computational framework that allowed transportability and simulations on massively parallel computers. A unique aspect of this model framework is the ability to interchange and intercompare different submodules to assess the sensitivity of numerical algorithms and model assumptions to simulation results. In this paper, we discuss the important attributes of the GMI effort and describe the GMI model computational framework and the numerical modules representing physical and chemical processes. As an application of the concept, we illustrate an analysis of the impact of advection algorithms on the dispersion of a NO_y-like source in the stratosphere which mimics that of a fleet of commercial supersonic transports (high-speed civil transport (HSCT)) flying between 17 and 20 km.