Abstract:

According to the ECTS system, students of Physics in the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) must prepare a Bachelor End Project (BEP) that is assigned 12 ECTSs before they get their degree in Physics (240 ECTSs). There are not clear rules on the kind of projects that can be assigned to the students. On the one hand, ideally, they should become an introduction for the students to what actual research means. On the other hand, they must be of the adequate difficulty, since they must be finished in the already mentioned 12 ECTSs.

In this communication we describe the experience of the coauthors in the preparation of one of those BEPs based in the use of a state of the art General Circulation Model of the Atmosphere (Model for Prediction Across Scales, MPAS-A) to simulate the general atmospheric circulation on an Aquaplanet (a planet similar to the Earth in terms of distance to the Sun and orbital parameters but fully covered by water). One of the coauthors (E. Larrazabal) is the student that developed the BEP, while the second coauthor (J. Sáenz) is the lecturer that supervised it.

Despite the fact that most of the teaching in the Degree of Physics of the University of the Basque Country (UPVEHU) is oriented to Solid State and Fundamental Physics, this topic was selected for this student since she had previously received some training in atmospheric Physics during a previous Seneca stay she did in Granada. This provided the student the needed background.

In this communication we describe the steps needed to simulate an Aquaplanet using a low resolution version of the MPAS-A model and we also show some of the results that were obtained. On the one hand, these results showed the student the impact the land surface plays in conditioning the atmospheric circulation above. On the other hand, the configuration of the model to be run in an Aquaplanet mode is not completely evident. Thus, the student also learned many contents related to how to configure the model, how to change the data in the low boundary and similar tricks that are not needed in standard MPAS-A runs. They helped the student to better understand the way initial and boundary conditions are used in atmospheric models. Finally, she also had to produce some plots or diagnostics of the model outputs so that computer languages NCL and python were also learned by the student. Besides everything above, we also present an estimation of the CPU time needed in our experiments, so that other users can realistically assess whether they can or not face this problem with the technical resources available.

Keywords:

Atmospheric general circulation, MPAS-A, aquaplanet, Bachelor End Project.