From the New Program Manager: May 2020

Xujing Davis, ESMD Program Manager, DOE BER

I hope this quarterly letter finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy during this unprecedented time. For me, it has been an exciting start to my role at DOE as Program Manager of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program (EESM) – the Earth System Model Development (ESMD) component. The regular calls with the E3SM Executive Committee, Core Group, and Next Generation Development (NGD) sub-project leaders, have been particularly informative while the Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project team meeting led to numerous fruitful discussions. The recent E3SM Leadership Meeting was instrumental in evaluating the current progress/management structure of Phase 2 and in the planning for the Phase 3 proposal. The bi-weekly interagency webinar on Global Model Cloud-Aerosol Research has been well-coordinated, enabling scientists supported by different agencies to tackle this challenging topic in climate modeling together. I have also been working with the EESM team on the proposal reviews to support the best projects available, from not only DOE labs but also broader research institutions across the nation.

I greatly appreciate the warm welcome I have received from the E3SM community and particularly wish to thank my supervisor, Gary Geernaert, my EESM colleagues (Sally McFarlane, Renu Joseph, Bob Vallario, and Jay Hnilo) for their exceptional efforts to integrate me to the team. Special thanks to Sally McFarlane for her excellent work and bringing me up to speed on ESMD program activities in a well-organized and strategic manner.  She has been extraordinarily generous in offering her time and wisdom, and I look forward to working alongside her over the next few months and beyond.   

I hope you will also enjoy the many inspiring stories in this newsletter, as I did. As I read through, I echo very much what Dorothy Koch emphasized in her farewell letter “As E3SM leverages the software and computing skills in the DOE laboratories, it has a unique opportunity to succeed in this space, and does so on behalf of the broader numerical weather/climate simulation community. In order to continue to succeed at this challenging task, E3SM depends on the interest and support of both DOE and the broader Earth system research/modeling community.”   

Thank you all for your dedication and hard work! I am here to help; feel free to contact me as needed.

Take extra care during this time,

Xujing Davis