Climate Modelling at the Bolin Centre for Climate Research
Title: Climate Modelling at the Bolin Centre for Climate Research
DNr: SNIC 2022/1-1
Project Type: SNIC Large Compute
Principal Investigator: Qiong Zhang <qiong.zhang@natgeo.su.se>
Affiliation: Stockholms universitet
Duration: 2022-07-01 – 2023-07-01
Classification: 10501
Homepage: http://www.bolin.su.se/
Keywords:

Abstract

This application is intended to provide the whole Bolin Centre for Climate Research at Stockholm University with computing time for climate modelling. Founded in 2006, the Bolin Centre is a multi-disciplinary consortium of researchers led by Stockholm University that conducts fundamental research on critical processes in the climate system. The research program strives to understand natural climate evolution and variability, as well as changes imposed by the increasing human impact on the Earth System. It aims to build next generation expertise and knowledge on climate-influencing processes, over a range of time-scales and subsystems while addressing related societal issues. The challenge is to effectively harness national scientific expertise in a growing international effort to understand, mitigate and adapt to climate change. The Bolin Centre involves scientists from the Departments of Meteorology, Environmental Science and Analytical Chemistry, Physical Geography and Geological Science at Stockholm University. The EC-Earth climate model is today used in a number of applications here at the Bolin Centre at Stockholm University. The EC-Earth climate model is our main tool in studying the climate. It is hence of vital importance for all our research that we continue to have access to high performance computational (HPC) resources. As part of the EC-Earth consortium, we, at the Bolin Centre in collaboration with the Rossby Centre at SMHI, have implemented the EC-Earth model on the Tetralith super computer. The present application is in contrast to the CMIP6 (6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) climate model integrations focusing on the direct scientific model computations as well as improvements of the climate model itself. More information on EC-Earth can be found under http://ecearth.knmi.nl/. At present we are developing the new next generation of EC-Earth climate model, which uses a coupled, global atmosphere/ocean/land/sea-ice model, a so called Earth System Model (ESM), in combination with observations and process models, to advance our understanding of climate system dynamics and the response of the climate to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Earlier Global Climate Models (GCMs) described only the physical-dynamical climate system. ESMs extend GCMs to include other important Earth System processes, such as biogeochemical cycles and interactive atmospheric chemistry, each of which may respond to, or modify an initial climate change signal. Our goal is to develop and evaluate a next-generation ESM to increase confidence in future climate change projections. This effort will feed into national, European and international climate change assessments, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We have a large number of individual research applications using climate models involving the majority of the staff at Bolin Centre for Climate Research. These research areas rely heavily on access to substantial high performance computational (HPC) resources, as well as on specific software, in terms of advanced computer codes developed or improved at the three applying centres.