From the Program Manager, Nov ’20: Landmark AGU Collection Published

Xujing Davis, ESMD Program Manager, DOE BER

Welcome to the November E3SM quarterly newsletter. It has been a busy and productive fall.

In addition to selected research highlights and E3SM news, this issue includes articles related to several major events:

• The ESMD-E3SM PI Virtual Meeting:  the virtual world didn’t prevent enthusiastic presentations and rigorous discussions at the recent ESMD-E3SM PI meeting in October. More than 200 scientists – from invited national and international speakers to ESMD PIs, which includes the E3SM team – presented at the meeting. These researchers shared their accomplishments, ongoing efforts and future plans for advancing the scientific development of E3SM. The group benefited from two keynote lectures on Earth system model development: one focused on the high-resolution frontier and the other on GPU porting strategies. The E3SM Outstanding Achievement Awards were presented to four scientists to recognize their exceptional contributions to E3SM development. Meeting participants voted to select the winner of the Best Poster Award. More information about the PI meeting can be found in this nice Reflection by Cristiana Stan. It was great to “meet” everyone and I want to thank you all for your dedication, presentations and participation! I want to sincerely acknowledge the countless hours of support from the PI Meeting Steering Committee (Dave Bader, Ruby Leung, Renata McCoy, Cristiana Stan, Mark Taylor, and Guang Zhang), E3SM Communication Team (Holly Davis and Tanya Reshel) and ORISE in overall planning, setting up and moderating the meeting. Most importantly, I hope the discussion, collaboration and coordination continue to develop and flourish.

• An E3SM AGU Special Collection:  the AGU special issue of E3SM journal articles is now complete with an introductory paper authored by the E3SM Executive Committee. This special issue features 50 papers from hundreds of authors documenting the new features in E3SM version 1 and those being integrated into E3SM version 2. One good example is the paper documenting and evaluating the new biogeochemistry configuration of E3SM v1.1. This new capability represents a major advance of E3SM and is essential for E3SM to address DOE’s energy mission.

• 2020 AGU Fall Meeting:  thanks to the hard work from our E3SM Communication Team and EESM Communication Team, you can find this well-organized list of presentations from E3SM scientists as well as ESMD, RGMA and MSD PIs. You may not want to miss the Jacob Bjerknes Lecture from our E3SM Chief Scientist, Ruby Leung, entitled “A Quest to Understand and Model Regional Precipitation and Their Future Changes (Invited)”. We are proud to see the recognition from AGU of Ruby’s work in advancing the basic understanding of the atmosphere and Earth’s climate. Congratulations, Ruby!

I look forward to “meeting” many of you at the AGU Fall Meeting and hope you continue to stay healthy and safe through the holiday season,

Xujing