From the Program Manager, Nov ’24: Celebrating a Decade of Earth System Modeling
Xujing Davis, E3SM Program Manager, DOE BER
Celebrating a decade of earth system modeling
As we approach the holiday season, the E3SM project has officially surpassed a decade of model development! I hope you have been enjoying the special articles throughout the year in our “Celebrating a Decade of Earth System Modeling” series. In this issue, we share with you a recap of the project’s “Then & Now”, focusing on three key areas for the project’s evolution: computational resources, code review evolution, and organizational and leadership changes. The project team is also excited to announce a special celebration event in honor of its 10th anniversary, taking place on December 8th in Washington D.C. area. This event will bring together E3SM current and past members, special guests from across US Modeling centers, E3SM users, DOE management and interagency colleagues. Thanks to our Communication Team’s effort, the E3SM store will be open at this special time, featuring a wide selection of E3SM-branded gear that you may be interested in.
Exciting scientific progress
Inspired by the recent success of ML-based global weather forecasts trained on reanalyses, an Ai2 Climate Emulator (ACE) has been trained using E3SMv2 global atmosphere model through a partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the climate modeling group of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2). ACE demonstrated its high skill in emulating E3SMv2 with a computational speedup of a factor of 100. This exciting result provides a strong foundation for ongoing and future E3SM exploration in emulating the fully coupled Earth system model beyond weather scale, with transformative scientific impacts in earth system science field.
A set of new capabilities of simulating floods have been developed through the Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) project, a multi-institutional coastal modeling endeavor jointly supported by all three program areas of the Earth and Environmental Systems Modeling Program (EESM). These developments, using a holistic model framework, address an important knowledge gap in current earth system models and allow more sophisticated representations of the multiscale, multi-driver, nonlinear nature of the flood processes. The targeted development in the regionally refined and coupled land-river-ocean model framework is to be further tested and enhanced, with the ultimate goal of being integrated into future version of the fully coupled E3SM for advanced simulations of coastal extremes in global settings. .
Newly available E3SM resources
In response to the strong interest in the use of E3SM’s new atmosphere model, EAMxx, which is the only atmosphere model able to run on all different types of DOE HPCswith demonstrated success in its global convection-permitting simulations (the configuration known as SCREAM), the E3SM team has compiled a list of valuable resources for getting started with EAMxx/SCREAM before the code is officially released or supported. The EAMxx team is actively working to improve the code performance, highlighted by their recent achievements during a NERSC GPU Hackathon on profiling on NVIDIA. You may also be interested in the newly released video featuring E3SM’s Gordon Bell Prize.
The project is also happy to announce the newly available datasets including E3SMv2.1, SCREAMv0 and SCREAMv1. In October, a new E3SM version v3.0.1 was released to introduce additional compsets and also fix some bugs found in compsets released with 3.0.0. Anyone is welcome to use E3SM open-source data and code, however, please follow the project’s policies on the use of the E3SM data or newly developed code.
Contribution to and leadership in international earth system modeling effort
In July, a group of DOE scientists including E3SM members joined more than 700 observationalists and modelers from around the world in Japan for the 9th Global Energy and Water Exchanges Open Science Conference, to review progress, coordinate initiatives, and strategize future directions in the research areas of observing, understanding, and modeling the global energy and water cycles. Please check out the report from Shaocheng Xie, E3SM Atmosphere Group Lead, on several ongoing research activities and future initiatives discussed at the conference with close relevance to E3SM such as a possible coordinated experiment of Global Storm-Resolving Models involving E3SM’s SCREAM.
In September, E3SM’s Chief Scientist Ruby Leung and Chief Computational Scientist Mark Taylor were among the global thought leaders to examine the need for a computational system and modeling framework that allows Earth System Models (ESMs) to run at kilometer resolution globally during the International Summit on a Computational System for Frontier Earth System Science and Climate Simulation & Projection. The summit explored various roles of AI, including the training of ML-based models of the earth system to be used together with kilometer ESMs toward desired goals.
Research highlights
The research highlights include 1) new cloud microphysics and wet removal treatments that have led to the improvements in E3SMv3 climate simulations; 2) an evaluation of E3SMv2 revealing the need to improve both model resolutions and model physics for more accurate representation of mesoscale convection systems; 3) a new strategy for evaluating models of atmospheric aerosol particles; 4) a study demonstrating that capturing finer-scale topographic differences improves model simulations of snowfall, snow water equivalent, and runoff, particularly in high-elevation regions where maximum precipitation occurred during the cool seasons; 5) refactorization of elastic–viscous–plastic sea ice dynamics solver that has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of long-term and multiple-ensemble-member earth system simulations; and 6) last but not least, a modern, simple, and robust python package called xCDAT addressing the performance needs of climate data analysis, serving users at DOE and broadly.
Concluding remarks
This year, the AGU fall meeting begins right after the E3SM 10 year celebration event. For more information, please visit the E3SM participation in both AGU and upcoming AMS, EESM related Town Halls and presentations. I look forward to seeing many of you in Washington, D.C.
I want to take a moment to express my gratitude for your another year of fantastic work. I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been part of this amazing earth system modeling journey during any period of the last 10 years!
Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season,
Xujing
