Sept. 16, 2024 — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences (CliMAS) will bring together more than 100 leading experts in climate, Earth System Modeling (ESM), computing and other sectors for the International Climate Computer Summit at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from September 29 through October 2, 2024.

This summit will convene an international group of authorities from academia, government, industry and non-profit organizations to examine the practicability of co-designing a special computational system and modeling framework that supports frontier Earth system science research and climate projection using kilometer-scale global resolution. Additionally, it will address how output from global high-resolution climate projections can be used – especially locally and regionally – to make decisions in areas such as economic and personal risk, health, infrastructure, food production, biodiversity, global geopolitical stability and others.

“Numerous groups around the world are pioneering high-resolution ESMs, which when combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to transform our understanding of the global Earth system and vastly improve our ability to project future climate states. That is one side of the coin,” said Kelvin K. Droegemeier, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Science and Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “The other side, which the summit is addressing, involves the computational environment required to achieve this transformation. It does not exist, even with AI, but we believe it can be created if the international climate research community joins forces in ways it never has before. Such an effort would not replace existing research strategies but rather add value to them, also opening new vistas of educational opportunity and providing practitioners and stakeholders with the information they need for making decisions across all sectors of society.”

The goal of the climate summit is to assemble the international community toward achieving a transformative milestone: to provide information about Earth’s climate system globally, with the detail of regional weather forecast models through the use of sophisticated ESMs at global resolutions of a few kilometers integrated with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Credible, detailed information at this scale can empower timely climate decision-making at local and regional scales. Achieving this important goal requires computational capabilities and software frameworks beyond those currently available commercially.

NCSA’s powerful supercomputing resources and expert team are well-equipped to tackle the challenge of climate change. For example, NCSA’s Blue Waters and iForge supercomputers hosted at the U. of I. helped researchers model volcanic activity with real-time data to provide daily forecasting, and data from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a powerful collection of integrated digital resources and services including supercomputers, visualization and storage systems, helped bring the Amazon’s “beating heart” weather patterns to life for researchers. NCSA is ready to be a powerful asset in the fight against climate change.

“NCSA and the University of Illinois have a long history of collaboration with climate researchers on solving the most challenging environmental questions,” NCSA Director Bill Gropp said. “Climate modeling of this scale will require innovative high-performance computing resources designed for these problems. With a tradition of deploying and helping scientists use the latest technologies, we are proud to sponsor this summit and demonstrate our commitment to helping decision-makers address and plan for climate uncertainty.”

The Summit will bring 100+ invited participants from around the world to Champaign-Urbana from sectors including government, climate research, higher education, computer science, technology and industry. The public is invited to attend the summit virtually at no charge, and all plenary sessions will be live-streamed globally during the summit. Registration for virtual attendance at the summit is available at this link.

The International Climate Computer Summit is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Maryland, Berkeley Lab, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the University of Utah and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

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Source: Jeff Kohmstedt, NCSA