The U.S. Department of Energy announced $10 million for 13 new projects in support of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), which seeks to provide more accurate and higher-resolution understanding and simulation of weather and climate events by using supercomputing facilities at DOE National Laboratories.

According to DOE, the new projects are “aimed at improving representation of oceans, atmosphere, and clouds, as well as simulation of extreme weather events such as intense precipitation, tropical cyclones, and monsoons. There is also a focus on longer-term processes, such as the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a recurring pattern of ocean and atmosphere interaction that occurs over decades in the Pacific.”

The projects involve analysis of how well models represent natural process, and where they can be improved by comparing the model with observations and development of new software designed to better simulate the processes in question. E3SM is run at three major high-performance computing centers: National Energy Research Science Computing (NERSC) center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LNL) and the Leadership Computing Centers at Argonne (ANL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL).

Here’s are snapshots of three of the new projects (project name, PI and affiliation, synopsis):

• Parameterizing the Impact of Mesoscale Eddies on Earth System Process in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (Anand Gnanadesikan, The Johns Hopkins University). The goal is to improve the representation of the diffusive component of mesoscale ocean eddies in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The ocean component of E3SM, the Model Prediction Across Scales, currently ignores this diffusive component. The new representation is expected to improve the representation of nutrient cycles, chlorophyll, global overturning, sea-surface temperatures and modes of variability such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation. The project is in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• Simulating extreme precipitation in the United States in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model: Investigating the importance of representing convective intensity versus dynamic structure (Gabriel Kooperman, University of Georgia Research Foundation). The main goal is to investigate how realistically extreme precipitation, in particular mesoscale convective systems(MCS), tropical cyclones (TCs), extratropical cyclones (ETCs), and atmospheric rivers (ARs), are captured in two versions of Exascale Energy Earth System Model (E3SM). An innovative component of the proposed activity is that it proposes to constrain both E3SM models, the High-resolution E3SM and the Superparameterized E3SM, to similar computational demands. This project is in collaboration with LLNL.
• Monsoon Extremes: Impacts, Metrics, and Synoptic-Scale Drivers (William Boos, Regents of University of California). The applicants propose to enhance a mechanistic understanding of precipitation extremes in monsoon systems by examining synoptic scale systems embedded in monsoons. The work will focus on synoptic (2-12 day) time scales, which include important events such as Gulf of California moisture surges, East Pacific easterly waves, and waves in the upper-level eastward jets that lie on the poleward edge of monsoon regions. The North American monsoon system which shares important characteristics to those of the South Asian monsoon will be investigated. This project is in collaboration with LBNL.

“Modeling the Earth system in all its complexity represents an enormous challenge,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. “The supercomputers at DOE National Laboratories are playing a critical role in this effort—a role that will grow in importance as we move into the era of next-generation exascale computing.”

Link to release: http://www.einnews.com/pr_news/457216743/department-of-energy-announces-10-million-for-earth-system-model-development-and-analysis

Link to full list of projects: https://science.energy.gov/~/media/DBD5E63323EB496BBBD912235676FC3A.ashx