From the Program Manager, May ’24: Working Towards v3 Simulation Campaign

Xujing Davis, E3SM Program Manager, DOE BER

As we enter the summer season, I hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy the beautiful spring blooms! For E3SM, the team has continued to make fruitful progress and broaden E3SM’s scientific impacts in the climate modeling science community.

Celebrating a Decade of Earth System Modeling (continued from the previous issue)

In this issue, we celebrate the project’s decadal progress by capturing E3SM in Numbers. These numbers, simple but meaningful, represent in some but not all aspects the team’s dedicated effort over the years. Thanks for everyone’s amazing work behind any of these, and Congratulations on the significant scientific advancement and impact they indicate!

Moreover, if you haven’t heard of E3SM’s Deep Dives Band, you do not want to miss the Fun Facts about it. Even if you knew of Deep Dives Band previously, I am sure you do not know the Fun Facts shared by E3SM’s residing comedian, Phil Jones. And if you still wonder how Deep Dives Band came together after reading the article but had a good laugh, then I share your puzzlement and joy.

Exciting Progress and Efforts

After almost a full year of extensive testing and bug fixing, E3SMv3.0 has been officially tagged! The team is now working towards v3 science campaign simulations. Documentation of v3 features and notable improvements is underway and will be shared in the future. Applause to the full team, particularly to the Coupled Group, for another major step forward!

A significant and exciting ongoing effort is the complete rewrite of the E3SM’s ocean component, from MPAS-Ocean to a new model called “Ocean Model for E3SM Global Applications” (OMEGA – Future E3SM Ocean Model). This upcoming new component coupled with E3SM’s SCREAM (the EAMxx exascale-ready atmosphere component) is envisioned to position DOE at the forefront of high-resolution coupled earth system modeling. Another goal in mind is to better serve the broader E3SM user and climate modeling science community through rigorous documentation and streamlined model configuration and framework. This major transition from MPAS-ocean to OMEGA has unavoidable impacts on the E3SM’s ecosystem projects that have plans to do developments to the ocean model. Please read about OMEGA’s plan carefully and work with the OMEGA Leadership (Luke van Roekel, Mark Petersen, Phil Jones, and Steven Brus) to discuss inclusion in MPAS-Ocean and how it may be transitioned to OMEGA.

This spring, the E3SM team held a sprint in the automated calibration of the SCREAM to demonstrate the AI capabilities of the DOE Exascale systems. The intensive few months of effort proved to be productive and rewarding. The scientific results and team experience will benefit E3SM development in the long term into the future. Kudos to the team, and with great appreciation to ASCR Exascale Computing Project (ECP) for providing this valuable opportunity and support!   

E3SM members have been excited by the release of E3SM-Unified 1.10.0, the latest version of the unified conda environment which has been a game changer for the E3SM project. It makes it much easier for everyone across the project to run and analyze E3SM. I want to join the team and thank Xylar Asay-Davis for his continued dedication to maintaining and expanding E3SM Unified!

Broadening E3SM Impacts, Science Community Involvement, Member Recognition

The 1^st ever hands-on E3SM Tutorial at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) turned out to be a big success. This exciting event, with several months of preparation and planning from the Organizers (Jill Zhang, Chris Terai, Mark Peterson, Wuyin Lin, and Noel Keen), and thorough preparation of the tutorial material from almost all team leads, provided a valuable opportunity for 56 participants across EESSD and DOE Office of Science supported projects, many of whom are early career researchers. Excellent work, all! Special thanks to NERSC for facilitating the use of the NERSC facility and providing a guided tour of the machine room to meeting attendees!

During the past three biannual Ocean Sciences Meetings (OSM), E3SM’s OMEGA Group co-lead Mark Peterson convened the “Numerical Methods in Computational Oceanography” session, filling in a critical gap to highlight research activities in developing algorithms, verifying models, and improving model performance. At this year’s OSM, he was joined by Steven Brus and Jeremy Lily (an E3SM ecosystem project member and a graduate student). The session was well attended with national and international experts in the earth system modeling field as well as early career researchers who benefitted greatly from this opportunity to communicate with more established peers.

E3SM continues to gain interest and attention. E3SM scientists have been invited to present E3SM work nationally and internationally and as guest experts in Star Talk Podcast (Jennifer Holm). A few of them have been recognized with honors including as members of the 2023 Highly Cited List (Ruby Leung, Steven Smith), an Outstanding Reviewer (Claudia Tebaldi), and a contributor to UCAR Best Paper (Bryce Harrop together with former E3SM members and current ecosystem scientists: Phil Rasch, Vince Larson and Hui Wan). Congratulations to all!

E3SM Involvement in Interagency Earth System Modeling Effort

On the interagency front, the 10th Annual US Climate Modeling Workshop and Summit were held once again at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in early May. E3SM representatives Dave Bader, the E3SM Project PI, and Ruby Leung, E3SM’s Chief Scientist, joined other modeling center leads in sharing major updates and discussing potential opportunities for collaboration and coordination. The meeting, co-organized by John Dunne of NOAA GFDL and Vijay Tallapragada of NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), was well-planned, executed, and productive. I very much enjoyed the presentations from all modeling centers and exchanges with participants including colleagues from other agencies. Thanks to John, Vijay, Ram (V. “Ram” Ramaswamy), Dale (Walton), and other GFDL colleagues for their hard work and hospitality!   

E3SM members continue to play active and important roles in the implementation teams of the Earth System Modeling and Prediction Subcommittee (ESMP) as part of the the Committee on Research and Innovation (CoRI) under the Interagency Council for Advancing Meteorological Services (ICAMS). In April, Mark Taylor (co-chair of the HPC team) and Rob Jacob (co-chair of the Common Model Architecture team) presented their team update during CoRI Meeting, which brought together representatives from multiple agencies that have investment and interest in weather and climate research.

Selected Research Highlights 

The research highlights in this issue include 1) the results from the Emissions-MIP effort, coordinated by researchers at PNNL with contributions from modeling teams around the world, revealing the importance of addressing inconsistency across models for the injection height of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere; 2) a comprehensive analysis of the E3SM Atmosphere Model (EAM) parameters, enhancing our understanding of the associated model behavior and guiding future parametrization development to reduce uncertainties; 3) a study of the data assimilation technique, illustrating its promise in improving subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) precipitation predictions in earth system models; 4) an investigation into the drivers of snow drought, filling the gap of limited global and systematic data–model comparisons; and 5) a comparison of the effect of two approaches to representing nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient supply under changing climate, providing quantitative evidence of how different nitrogen and phosphorus limitation strategies can diversely affect future carbon and nutrient dynamics.

Around DOE

At DOE, we are busy with panel reviews, and planning of the upcoming EESM PI Meeting and SciDAC PI Meeting. Please remember to check the deadlines for registering and abstract submissions. I look forward to seeing many of you in July and/or August!  

At the end of this message, I cannot believe how much the team has achieved over the last few months. Thank you all very much again and keep up with the good work!

Xujing