From the Program Manager, Feb ’25: Entering a New Decade of Development
Xujing Davis, E3SM Program Manager, DOE BER
Entering the next decade of model development
Welcome to the E3SM newsletter. As we enter the new year, E3SM project has wrapped up a decade of earth system model development. In December, the team enjoyed the opportunity to celebrate the project’s 10th year anniversary together with collaborators, distinguished guests from various US Earth system modeling centers, and DOE Management, to commemorate the significant achievements and milestones accomplished over the past decade. During the event, DOE management recognized the E3SM project PI, Dr. David Bader, for his outstanding leadership and exceptional contribution to the E3SM project and the DOE mission. The panel sessions focusing on “Future of Earth system modeling in the United States” and “E3SM for Science and Use-Inspired Research” provided invaluable perspectives as the E3SM leadership team is developing its new decadal strategic vision, which will be one of the major foci of the ongoing E3SM All Hands Meeting this week.
Scientific Progress in Icesheet Modeling
With the effort across the E3SM ecosystem supported by both Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Programs over the years, exciting progress has been made in E3SM’s dynamic icesheet modeling and sea level change projection capabilities. The E3SM’s ice-sheet model, MALI, is now a mature, variable resolution, high-fidelity ice-sheet model, and the first large-scale ice-sheet model to routinely run on GPUs. The coupling of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets to the land and ocean components in the E3SM is near completion. Built on these, E3SM and its partnership projects are working together in developing a unified and integrated sea-level change capability.
Research Highlights
In this issue, you can get a glimpse of other modeling progress through a few selected research highlights including: a study discovering the under-explored potential of the Tibetan Plateau as a significant source of predictability for European heatwaves on subseasonal-to-interannual time scales; an investigation revealing the importance of counting correlations between cloud droplet number concentration and liquid water content in Earth system models for its accurate representation of the effects of cloud variability on rain formation; an advancement in better representing methane dynamics from lake models in earth system models; the development and implementation of a new local time-stepping scheme in MPAS-ocean, demonstrating 10 times speedup when simulating storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy.
Reminders
E3SM was well represented in recent AGU and AMS conferences, you can find the full list of the presentations online.
For those who missed earlier, please check out the wide range of E3SM branded merchandise with 10-year Anniversary images in our E3SM webstore.
Thanks to all for another few months of great progress and a productive all hands meeting! Have a safe trip back home and I look forward to working with everyone into the next decade,
Xujing
