Modeling

Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a community-developed, fully-coupled global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of Earth’s past, present, and future climate states. Vital elements for CESM’s development include modern parameterizations, software engineering, and observational data sets. CESM simulation support is targeted to provide the CESM community with a single code base that enables out-of-the-box capabilities for the entire modeling process. This single code base supports model parameterization development, and minimizes computational resources.

More information is available at https://www.cesm.ucar.edu


Earth System Modeling

The Earth System Modeling (ESM) Program supports the development of innovative Earth system modeling capabilities, with the ultimate goal of providing accurate and computationally advanced representations of the fully coupled and integrated Earth system, as needed for energy and related sectoral infrastructure planning. Key examples of critical information for energy include accurate projections of water availability, drought incidence and persistence, temperature extremes including prolonged heat stress, probability of storms, opening of the Arctic Ocean, and sea level and storm-surge at coastal regions. In order to provide this information, considerable effort is needed to develop optimal-fidelity climate and Earth system simulations, with suitably-accurate representation of atmospheric dynamics, clouds and chemistry, ocean circulation and biogeochemistry, land biogeochemistry and hydrology, sea-ice and dynamic land-ice, and in each case including elements of human activities that affect these systems such as water management and land-use.

Current Earth System Projects

Current Regional & Global Climate Modeling Projects