Description of the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM 5.0)

The material provides an overview of the major model components, and the way in which they interact as the numerical integration proceeds. Details on the coding implementation, along with in-depth information on running the CAM 5.0 code, are given in a separate technical report entitled "User's Guide to Community Atmosphere ModelCAM 5.0" [Eaton, 2010].

As before, it is our objective that this model provide NCAR and the university research community with a reliable, well documented atmospheric general circulation model. This version of the CAM 5.0 incorporates a number enhancements to the physics package (e.g. adjustments to the deep convection algorithm including the addition of Convective Momentum Transports (CMT), a transition to the finite volume dynamical core as default and the option to run a computationally highly scaleable dynamical core).