PALM

PALM is a large-eddy simulation (LES) model for atmospheric and oceanic flows which is especially designed for performing on massively parallel computer architectures. PALM is free software. It can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License (v3).

Some of PALM's highlights are

• excellent scaling, so far tested up to 32,000 cores
• on-the-fly data analysis (during model runs) in order to avoid I/O bottlenecks
• topography realized on Cartesian grid (allows for steep topography)
• interactive land surface model, coupled to the RRTMG radiation code
• non-cyclic horizontal boundary conditions including turbulent inflow
• wind turbine model (ADM-R) is implemented
• code can be switched to ocean version with salinity equation and equation of state for seawater
• embedded parallelized Lagrangian particle model for various applications (footprint calculation, simulation of cloud droplet growth, visualization, etc.)
• interface allowing users to plug in their own code extensions without modifying the default code
• advanced shell scripts for installing and running the code in interactive and batch mode are available
• code is permanently maintained and improved by the PALM group and other users; code management is based on subversion

PALM is regularly tested. The test status of the current revision is: More details here

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PALM news

[ 2017-11-22 ] The Karl Doetsch Young Scientist Award (​ award details) for outstanding theses was awarded to Sebastian Giersch this year for his Master thesis titled Flight Simulations in LES Generated Near-Surface Turbulent Wind Fields(photo).
[ 2017-06-02 ] This years PALM seminar is held at the Institute of Meteorology and Climatology, Leibniz Universität Hannover, 25th - 29th September (details).
[ 2017-05-30 ] New topography and surface-modeling concept implemented (details).
[ 2017-02-10 ] PALM celebrates 10 years of code development using SVN.
[ 2016-10-26 ] PALM now features an anelastic approximation for its model equations. This paves the way for the simulation of deep convective clouds with PALM (details).

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PALM users world map¹

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1. 1. The world map shows groups that work with PALM and that have published at least one paper. You want to be listed in the map? Let ​us know!