From the Program Manager, May ’21: Progress Continues

Xujing Davis, ESMD Program Manager, DOE BER

I have many exciting updates to share in this issue.

The E3SMv1 summary paper has been recognized by the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES) for its immediate impact in the community. Congratulations to the 79 authors and all those who contributed to the v1 development!

The new atmosphere model that the E3SM project is building, i.e., the Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM), has demonstrated its early success via its 3 km global simulation with improved representation of numerous fine-scale weather events. At the recent America Resilient Climate Conference, Drs. Gary Geernaert, Ruby Leung, and Peter Caldwell discussed how E3SM’s high-resolution climate projections could provide actionable information for individual communities to build resilience. The U.S. Secretary of Energy, Dr. Jennifer Granholm, in her final remarks of the conference, emphasized the importance of high-resolution prediction data for climate impacts and crisis analysis.

Aiming toward more accurate numerical representation and prediction, E3SM scientists have made many advances, more than this issue can include. The advantage of higher resolution has been underscored through an assessment of the realism and biases of tropical cyclones at various spatial resolutions in E3SMv1. A study of the sensitivity of the temporal resolution in the E3SM Atmosphere Model version 1 (EAMv1) reveals that increasing the temporal resolution in all major parts of the model by a factor of six leads to significant changes in the simulated long-term mean temperature, humidity, and cloud amounts. The accurate simulation of precipitation in global climate models (GCMs) is of great scientific and societal interest. The implementation of a stochastic deep convection scheme in EAMv1 has led to notable improvement in global and regional precipitation distribution, intensity, and frequency. Efficient, accurate, and stable coupling schemes, or couplers, are essential for large scale predictive simulations in global Earth systems. An Interface-Flux-Recovery (IFR) coupling method has been formulated which improves upon conventional coupling techniques in climate models. E3SM scientists also participated in a study to examine the consequences of a new set of future scenarios based on the simulations of Earth system models from all over the world. To inform our understanding of the impact of new technologies and therefore our planning for performance portable design to ensure good performance across diverse architectures, the computational performance of E3SM’s atmospheric dynamical core has been investigated on Fugaku, the fastest supercomputer in the world at the moment.

Based on new challenges encountered in building the E3SM model and the increasing interest in E3SM output, E3SM team leaders devoted substantial time in the April E3SM Leadership Meeting to evaluate the current progress and refine future plans including improving the code review process, the coordination with other projects, and making more E3SM data available in CMIP format.

In May, E3SM Scientist Andrew Roberts received the 2020 Editors’ Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for JAMES. Our Chief Scientist Ruby Leung was featured in a DOE Office of Science Twitter post for Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Congratulations, Andrew and Ruby!

I, with the E3SM Communication Team, also would like to congratulate Dorothy Koch, E3SM’s previous program manager, on her new role as the director of the Weather Program Office at NOAA!

Please remember to download the newly-published ESMD-E3SM 2020 PI Meeting Report for a good capture of ESMD funded research activities supporting the E3SM development effort. The 150 AI4ESP white papers are also now publicly available and a follow-on workshop is being planned. More details will be shared when they are available. Additional updates can be gleaned from the recent publications, publicity, all-hands presentations, and career opportunities.

Thanks for your contribution to, interest in, and support of E3SM!

Xujing