Conformal octagon: An attractive framework for global models offering quasi-uniform regional enhancement of resolution

With the increasingly widespread adoption of massively parallel processing (MPP) computers for applications in computational fluid dynamics it becomes appropriate to reconsider the geometrical configuration of the computational grid that best suits the problem. In the case of global numerical weather prediction we have recently advocated a conformal spherical-cubic geometry. Among its merits, this grid lends itself naturally to simple domain-decomposition and obviates the need for polar filtering.