Report from All-Hands
The E3SM All-Hands Spring Meeting, held June 9-11, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda in Bethesda, Maryland, brought together E3SM staff, DOE program managers, and invited ecosystem partners (Fig. 1) for three days of scientific exchange, coordination, and forward planning.
Figure 1. E3SM group photo at the E3SM All-Hands meeting in June 2026 in Bethesda.
The meeting opened with introductory remarks, logistics updates, DOE BER remarks and a State of E3SM presentation from the project’s Principal Investigator (PI), Peter Caldwell, followed by recognition of E3SM awards and AI-in-Action awards. Those honors highlighted both scientific achievement across the project and the growing impact of AI-enabled approaches in E3SM research and development.
Across the plenary sessions, breakout discussions, and poster presentations, attendees shared progress on core project priorities, including atmosphere, ocean, land, coupled modeling, seasonal-to-decadal prediction, human and Earth systems, infrastructure, and extreme events. Sessions also covered model performance, reproducibility, diagnostics, data assimilation, and the expanding role of machine learning and AI in analysis and model development.
The agenda reflected the breadth of the E3SM portfolio. Highlights included work on storm tracking in EAMxx, new runoff representation, urban moisture and isotope tracing, improved cloud microphysics, a unified surface mesh for E3SMv4, flood simulation, SCORPIO v2, and advances in non-bit-for-bit testing and in-situ diagnostics. The seasonal-to-decadal sessions showcased the E3SM S2D pilot study, hindcast skill assessment, land-atmosphere data assimilation, and BluePulse, while the AI breakout emphasized practical use cases ranging from trustworthy agentic AI for analysis to constrained learning for land model initialization and AI for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
Poster sessions provided an especially broad snapshot of current work across the project and ecosystem. Topics ranged from snow-on-sea-ice and Greenland ice sheet impacts to wildfire emissions coupling, compound hazard risk, urban heat risk, and Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM) calibration using ARM data and LES. Together, the posters underscored the depth of collaboration across E3SM and its DOE-supported ecosystem.
Figure 2. E3SM band “Deep Dives” perform at the All-Hands Meeting in Bethesda. From left to right: Walter Hannah (LLNL), Mark Petersen (LANL), Angela Jefferson (LLNL) and Peter Thornton (ORNL).
The meeting also included time for community connection, most notably a performance by the E3SM band, Deep Dives (Fig 2.), which added a memorable social event close to an already full scientific program.
Overall, the 2026 E3SM All-Hands Spring Meeting reinforced the project’s momentum, strengthened ties across the E3SM and ecosystem projects, and helped align participants around the science, modeling, and computational priorities that will shape E3SM’s next phase.
Contact
- Renata McCoy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
This article is a part of the E3SM “Floating Points” Newsletter, to read the full Newsletter check:
- E3SM Floating Points, Aug ’26: Title TBD
