From the Program Manager, May ’23: Working Towards E3SMv3 and All-Hands Meeting

Xujing Davis, E3SM Program Manager, DOE BER

Working towards E3SMv3 and All-Hands Meeting

I hope you all have a great start to the summer. For the E3SM project, the team has been busy testing new developments from different branches in coupled simulations to get ready for the E3SM version 3 release. The team has also been excited by and preparing for the upcoming E3SM All-Hands Meeting, which is less than a month away. Though mainly a working meeting, the hybrid All-Hands meeting is open to everyone and it does require registration with a deadline of June 15^th. Please check the details on the Upcoming 2023 E3SM All-Hands Meeting post for further information and register on time!

E3SM as an Open Development Project

Since the release of E3SMv1 in 2018, E3SM has become an open source development project. Over the years, the team has developed a set of best practices for model development, running simulations, and performing standard data analysis. As the project starts a new phase, it is a great time to remind everyone what open development means for E3SM developers as well as for external users. Along similar lines, the E3SM team has begun building a publicly-accessible Library of Regionally Refined Model (RRM) Grids first for the atmosphere model for North America, the Antarctic, the Eastern US, California, and the Amazon. The goal of this library is to provide only trustworthy grids to interested users. The researchers welcome additional grids’ contributions based on peer-reviewed publications. Another gentle reminder is that E3SM webinars are open to all on a biweekly basis, please check out the upcoming webinars and put on your calendar your interested ones. If you missed any, you can also check out their recordings.   

This year, the annual U.S. Climate Modeling Summit was held in a hybrid format at the NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). It has been a great experience to join colleagues (in person) from six US modeling centers including representatives from the E3SM team. Thanks to the organization of co-chairs (John Dunne of GFDL and Ruby Leung of DOE/E3SM) and the hospitality of GFDL colleagues, it was a very informative, productive, and enjoyable meeting.

E3SM in Spotlights & Model-date Integration

E3SM has been in multiple Spotlights. It started with the Sandia National Lab’s news and SC23 Communications story on E3SM’s breakthrough exascale simulations, highlighting E3SM as the first global cloud-resolving model to simulate a world’s year of climate in a day. Later, the DOE Office of Science (SC) Earth Day article featured E3SM, presenting its capabilities, unique strengths, and ongoing efforts. SC Director Dr. Asmeret Berhe’s Column additionally publicized SC’s leadership in Earth system science observations (ARM) and modeling (E3SM).  

As Dr. Berhe pointed out, ARM observations are invaluable for model development and validation. Thanks to ARM’s dedicated efforts, ARM and E3SM have continued discussions to further identify opportunities for synergies and specific areas of collaboration.   

Research Highlights

Within the Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project, the model development team has focused on the development of a new extreme storm and weather impact configuration for the ocean, land-surface, and river components. The team’s recent advances have led to new tides, storm-surge and inundation-enabled E3SM, with MPAS-O, MOSART, and ELM running on a unified regionally-refined unstructured mesh. Results from an Early Career Award have revealed that incorporating coastal vegetation types and their tolerances to salinity and flooding can improve land models. Further, another study has demonstrated that consideration of crop rotation in the E3SM land model could produce more accurate representations of carbon and energy. Moreover, a new snow albedo model tested in E3SMv2 has shown improvements in snow distribution and snow cover bias reduction. Based on the examination of output from a suite of thirty-six CMIP6 models, recent analysis has suggested that the slowing overturning circulation would likely lead to reduced CO2 uptake and growing nutrient sequestration, providing positive feedback for climate warmings.

At DOE

Within Biological and Environmental Research (BER), all program managers have been busy with various review panels and funding actions. In concert with the recently announced funding for Energy Earthshot Research Centers (EERCs), DOE SC announced another funding opportunity for Research on the Science Foundations for Energy Earthshots. Besides funding opportunities, a comprehensive web portal for climate science projects funded by BER, a National Virtual Climate Laboratory (NVCL), has also been launched to enable more efficient and broad engagement with DOE’s climate science and technology.

BER management is still under transition while a search for a permanent Associate Director (AD) is underway. Gary Geernaert is currently serving as the acting AD of BER and Sally McFarlane, as the acting Director of EESSD. The AAA fellow Olga Tweedy has recently left DOE for a new position at Vanderbilt University. We thank her for her leadership in AI4ESP and coordinating many research activities across the the Environmental System Modeling (EESM) program and EESSD. We greatly value her contribution to EESM including recent past issues of E3SM newsletters and wish her all the best for her new role at Vanderbilt.

A hybrid SciDAC-5 PI meeting is being planned and will be held during September 12-14 this year. While the in person component has limited number of allowed participants, the plenary session will be open virtually broadly. Please stay tuned for further updates.

I hope you will enjoy the updates in this issue of the E3SM Newsletter. I wish you a great rest of the summer and I am looking forward to seeing many of you at the June E3SM All-Hands Meeting,

Xujing