Automatic differentiation as a tool for sensitivity analysis of a convective storm in a 3-D cloud model

The ADIFOR automatic differentiation tool is applied to a 3-D storm-scale meteorological model to generate a sensitivity-enhanced code capable of providing derivatives of all model output variables and related diagnostic (derived) parameters as a function of specified control parameters. The tangent linear approximation, applied to a deep convective storm by the first of its kind using a full-physics compressible model, is valid up to 50 min for a 1% water vapor perturbations. The result is very encouraging considering the highly nonlinear and discontinuous properties of solutions. The ADIFOR-generated code has provided valuable sensitivity information on storm dynamics. Especially, it is very efficient and useful for investigating how a perturbation inserted at earlier time propagates through the model variables at later times. However, it is computationally very expensive to be applied to the variational data assimilation, especially for 3-D meteorological models, which potentially have a large number of input variables.