Introducing the new Regional Community Earth System Model, R-CESM

Among countless potential applications of R-CESM, we showcase here a few preliminary studies that illustrate its novel aspects and value. These include 1) assessing the skill of R-CESM in a multiyear, high-resolution, regional coupled simulation of the Gulf of Mexico; 2) examining the impact of WRF and CESM ocean-atmosphere coupling physics on tropical cyclone simulations; and 3) a convection-permitting simulation of submesoscale ocean- atmosphere interactions.

We also discuss capabilities under development such as (i) regional refinement using a high-resolution ROMS nested within global CESM and (ii) "online" coupled data assimilation. Our open-source framework (publicly available at github.com/ihesp/rcesm1) can be easily adapted to a broad range of applications that are of interest to the users of CESM, WRF, and ROMS.