NCAR global model topography generation software for unstructured grids.

It is the purpose of this paper to document the NCAR global model topography generation software for unstructured grids. Given a model grid, the software computes the fraction of the grid box covered by land, the gridbox mean elevation, and associated sub-grid scale variances commonly used for gravity wave and turbulent mountain stress parameterizations. The software supports regular latitude-longitude grids as well as unstructured grids; e.g. icosahedral, Voronoi, cubed-sphere and variable resolution grids. As an example application and in the spirit of documenting model development, exploratory simulations illustrating the impacts of topographic smoothing with the NCARDOE CESM (Community Earth System Model) CAM5.2-SE (Community Atmosphere Model version 5.2 - Spectral Elements dynamical core) are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]