The CAM-SE atmospheric dynamical core makes use of low order representations of the atmospheric column. Recently, increased vertical resolution has been shown to be critical for resolving important phenomena such as the QBO, but the computational cost can be prohibitive. A high order spectral vertical representation has the potential to alleviate this problem by improving the accuracy at a fixed resolution or by reducing the computational cost for a given accuracy target. Phenomenological and performance impacts of this approach are investigated for both hydrostatic and nonhydrostatic climate models.