High Resolution Earth System Modeling for International Climate Assessment

Ryan Sriver, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Ryan Sriver, Ryan Mokos, James Edwards, John Truesdale, Zachary Zobel, Hui Li, Warren Strand Jr, Ilana Stern, Nan Rosenbloom, Susan Bates, Swarnali Sanyal, Chris Fischer, Jun Zhang, Angeline Pendergrass

This collaborative research between the University of Illinois and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is aimed at using the Blue Waters petascale resources to address key uncertainties associated with the numerical modeling of the Earth's climate system and the ability to accurately analyze past and projected future changes in climate. The project brings together a team of scientists to address these issues with well-recognized expertise in the study of past and future projections of climate and extensive experience in national and international assessments of climate change, as well as experts in computer science and information technology. The petascale computing capabilities will allow the project to pursue climate extremes and analysis of uncertainties in ways that were impossible before by allowing for completion of very high resolution atmosphere and ocean fully-coupled climate simulations, a task that requires a large computing allocation only achievable on petascale systems like Blue Waters.

This project has two purposes distinguished by the model resolution to be employed. Both climate model simulations will be conducted with an advanced version of the NSF-DOE Community Earth System Model (CESM). CESM, one of the world's best models of Earth's climate system, has been developed by NCAR in coordination with a community of scientists at universities and national laboratories. The first purpose is aimed at better quantifying future regional climate change, focusing on climate extremes, by running century-long, high-resolution (0.25 degree atmosphere/land, 1 degree ocean/sea ice) global coupled climate simulations, including multiple ensemble members of 20th Century and future scenarios. The second purpose will be specific studies that grow upon the project's existing Blue Water's allocation to further clarify the effects of small-scale regional features and interactions across spatial scales in climate through even higher-resolution climate simulations (0.25 degree atmosphere/land, 0.1 degree ocean/sea ice) that will push the state-of-the-art for such analysis.