High Resolution Earth System Modeling Using Blue Waters Capabilities

Robert Rauber, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Xin-Zhong Liang, Donald J. Wuebbles, Robert Rauber, Ryan Mokos, David Bailey, James Edwards, John Truesdale, Adrianne Middleton, Jay Shollenberger, Chao Sun, David New, Zachary Zobel, Alice Bertini, Warren Strand Jr, Ilana Stern, Nan Rosenbloom, Susan Bates, Hao He, Katherine Thayer-Calder, Richard Small, Swarnali Sanyal, Chris Fischer

This project will use Blue Waters and cutting-edge modeling software in advancing the study of climate change and its potential impacts on our planet over this century. It is expected that results from our studies will be an integral part of the scientific analysis of climate change for the next major international climate assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the next U.S. National Climate Assessment. These assessments are an important input to the national and international policy development process. These analyses will be a significant contribution to the coordinated international special computational studies and model intercomparison to analyze past and projected future changes in the Earth's climate system. In addition, the results of these studies will be fully available to the scientific community for further analyses and resulting insights into the processes, mechanisms, and consequences of climate variability and climate change. On top of this, these studies will be a major input to studies of the potential impacts of climate change on human society across many different sectors (e.g., health, food, water, energy, transportation) and on ecosystems. No previous global modeling study has provided such high resolution information at the regional scales over the time periods needed to fully analyze these issues. The simulations and analyses are designed to use the Blue Waters petascale computing resources and could not be completed without a computational resource like Blue Waters.

This project has two purposes. The first is aimed at better quantifying future regional climate change by running a high-resolution (0.25° atmosphere, 1° ocean) global coupled climate model, namely an advanced version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), in the framework of CMIP6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6) to meet the needs for the next generation assessments of climate change. CMIP6 will be the next phase in the international coordination of special computational studies to analyze the past and projected future changes in the Earth's climate system. CESM, one of the world's best models of the Earth's climate system, has been developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in coordination with a community of scientists at universities and national laboratories. The second purpose will be specific studies that grow upon our existing NSF PRAC project to further clarify the understanding the effects of small-scale regional features and interactions across spatial scales in climate through even higher-resolution CESM modeling studies on Blue Waters that will push the state-of-the-art for such analyses. For this project, we have assembled a team from the University of Illinois and NCAR comprised of both highly recognized experts in global climate modeling and analysis and experts in computer science and information technology.