Anyone have experience on choosing timesteps for MOM6 (panan runs in particular)? We currently are using DT (baroclinic) = 900 for the 1/10th panan. This seems long already compared to ACCESS-OM2-01. But can we push it further, have we tried? Is it the same process as ACCESS-OM2-01? i.e. are we fine to try to push it further unless we get crashes?
1 Like
The mom6.out, ocean.stats and ocean.stats.nc all have maximum CFL information, depending on how you want to parse it. As long as this remains under 0.5, there won’t be velocity truncations. The other trick in MOM6 is that the DT_THERM (thermodynamic/tracer adection timestep) can be longer than the baroclinic one, which could save a bit too.
1 Like
That’s useful thanks Angus! And how do we decide how long DT_THERM can be?
Also, any info on limits on the coupler timestep would be useful too while we’re at it, since it seems like they’re all supposed to be multiples of one another.
I don’t actually know what the limiting factor on this would be. I guess as it gets longer you decouple the dynamics from the thermodynamic state. I’ve only really seen this in the range of 2-4x DT, though I don’t know if those values were any better motivated!
I think this would mostly affect the atmospheric forcing. My understanding is that SIS2 has a “fast” timestep that is closely-coupled with MOM6, but the “slow” timestep probably still goes through the coupler. Anyway, on both these fronts I haven’t run across anything definitive regarding their limits. The ocean dynamics still tends to dominate overall runtime, so the baroclinic timestep is the primary control for this.
1 Like
After doing a bit more investigation (mostly listening to Bob talk about timestepping here and looking at timesteps in MOM6 examples), I think we can run with a longer tracer timestep (DT_THERM) than we have been. The OM4 cases (both 1/4deg and 1/2deg) use DT_THERM = 7200. We are currently running our panan-01 cases with DT_THERM = 1800. I did a test of increasing this to 3600 and got a 20% speed up. It sounds like there is no reason to decrease DT_THERM below 3600 even as we increase resolution. Hopefully this should improve our timing estimates for the 1/40th panan considerably.
Any opinions on whether we should use DT_THERM = 3600 or 7200?
3 Likes