From the PI, February ’26: A Bit More Stability, a Bit More Change

Dr. Peter Caldwell, E3SM PI

Welcome to the winter 2026 E3SM newsletter! It has been another big quarter – Congress passed DOE’s appropriations bill, Dr. Sally McFarlane became E3SM’s permanent program manager, we contributed to 106 presentations at the AGU Annual meeting and 36 at AMS, and 7 of our manuscripts were published. Our v3 atmosphere group and C++ atmosphere groups have merged into a single group which is aimed at delivering the E3SM v4 model by 2028. We are midway through spinning up E3SMv3 high-resolution (HR), coupled biogeochemistry, and Greenland ice sheet simulations. We also finalized our Southern Ocean regionally-refined v3 configuration and released a new version of E3SM Unified. We are continuing to strengthen ties with other DOE projects, as highlighted by Nephele, QBO SciDAC, and ORBIT-2 articles in this newsletter.

The project continues to reorganize around DOE’s new priorities. Our seasonal-to-decadal prediction group is finishing preparations for its first experiment campaign and contemplating how to add a subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction component to its work. Our AI group is building an emulator for the E3SMv3 HR model and adding the ability to swap E3SM components for emulated versions. Non-emulator AI tasks continue within the other E3SM groups. In order to encourage adoption of AI productivity tools, the project has just kicked off an AI in Action competition. The Human-Earth System group is exploring ways to better connect E3SM to the US energy system. The E3SM atmosphere group is pushing to large-eddy resolving scales, which are needed to better capture the impacts of extreme storms.

As always, I’m incredibly proud and thankful of all the great work performed by the E3SM team and our collaborators. I hope you enjoy this quarter’s edition of Floating Points!