Objectives

IS-ENES3 has three main objectives:

  • Pursue the integration of the Earth’s climate system modelling community and prepare the sustainability of its infrastructure
  • Foster the common development of models and tools, and the efficient use of High-Performance Computing (HPC)
  • Support the exploitation of model data by the Earth system science community, the climate change impact community and the climate service community.

In more details, these three objectives include:

Pursue the integration of the Earth’s climate system modelling community and prepare the sustainability of its infrastructure.

  • Establish stronger ties with parties either underrepresented within, or relatively new to, the ENES community, in particular through training and schools (e.g. groups in Eastern Europe and the impact modelling community);
  • Build on existing governance and communication activities to prepare a sustainable infrastructure by developing a robust stakeholder consensus on downstream user requirements;
  • Strengthen existing collaborations with third parties, and developing new relationships and synergies with other infrastructures, projects, initiatives, and communities, particularly those where IS-ENES knowledge and/or services will bring wider impact;
  • Develop a strategy for the infrastructure needed by the ENES community in the next decade seeking opportunities for interoperability among infrastructures.

Foster the common development of models and tools, and the efficient use of High-Performance Computing.

  • Create sustainable communities through the coordination of network and joint research activities;
  • Develop common, sustainable model infrastructure, including support for relatively new software tools evaluated in previous phases;
  • Where possible, share development of common model components, with a focus on developing a common European sea ice model and on improving the computational performance of the European ocean platform;
  • Promote the use of new metrics for evaluating model computational performance aimed at understanding the relative efficiency of codes and how best to use available HPC;
  • Provide community leadership and knowledge exchange, aimed at responding to the existing strategy, and improving the exploitation of HPC both nationally and internationally (e.g. ENES use of PRACE);
  • Explore new avenues and tools, such as Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Support the exploitation of model data by the Earth system science community, the climate change impact community and the climate service community.

  • Maintain and develop the European component of the global Earth System Grid Federation with the aim of supporting the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), expected to require storing and supporting access to tens of petabytes of data;
  • Develop a new service to ease multi-model data analytics;
  • Put the infrastructure and governance of key metadata and data standards (e.g. Climate Forecast conventions for NetCDF, documentation of models and simulations) onto a sustainable footing
  • Raise the standard for Earth system model evaluation by gathering more detailed understanding of user requirements, by promoting standards for the science provenance, and by developing a state-of-the-art community European model evaluation framework;
  • Invest in the operation and development of the climate4impact platform and the underlying services to enable customised access to data, documentation, and information about model evaluation to the climate impact community as well as climate service businesses and consultancies.