Productive Spring E3SM All-Hands Meeting

2019 Spring E3SM Meeting, Group Photo

One-hundred and thirty people attended the 2019 E3SM Spring All-Hands Meeting in Westminster, Colorado in March 2019. This event, which was the first Phase 2 all-hands assembly, allowed scientists and engineers across several E3SM groups to stay informed about each other’s work. The meeting also provided an opportunity for the E3SM groups with distributed members to meet in-person to review the groups’ current and future direction as well as identify key areas where further discussion is necessary as work progresses.

On the first day, March 19, 2019, plenary sessions provided status updates on the project and the work of the core groups: Water Cycle, Biogeochemical Cycles, Cryosphere, Infrastructure and Performance. Over the course of the two and a half day meeting, the Next Generation Development (NGD) groups (Software and Algorithms, Non-hydrostatic Atmospheric Model, Atmospheric Physics, and Energy and Land) which focus on the development for E3SM versions 3 and 4 models, also met. Many smaller NGD, crosscutting core or focus groups met in parallel sessions to discuss specific, often specialized topics. A few of the crucial and ongoing topics included model biases, metrics, coastal biogeochemical cycles, science experiment coordination, the code review process, model validation and benchmarking, high resolution and BGC paper planning, and determination of new grids to address areas of concern.

Researchers began finalizing the Phase 2 development schedule and discussed which features they’d like to include in version 2 and which will be added later. June 30, 2019 is the proposed code freeze date for version 2. Discussions to agree on the particulars of the schedule are still ongoing.

While the meeting was quite productive and involved some long hours, it was not all work and no play with the “Deep Dives” E3SM entertainment group giving a musical performance late Wednesday afternoon with tributes to Old Time Computing, E3SM Project Engineer Renata McCoy and past DOE Program Manager Dorothy Koch. There was also time for Dr. Gary Geernaert, Director of Climate and Environmental Sciences Division at the Department of Energy, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, to present the exceptional contribution to E3SM project awards to three E3SM individuals: PNNL’s Ben Bond-Lamberty, LANL’s Mat Maltrud, and LLNL’s Qi Tang.