This INCITE project supports the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) model, a multi-laboratory project developing a leading-edge climate and Earth system designed to address DOE mission needs.

Taking advantage of new leadership-class computing architectures, E3SM is now capable of simulations that resolve individual storms yet also run sufficiently long to separate climate signal from weather noise. Uncertainty in the parameterization of large convective storms has been identified as the primary source of uncertainty in climate predictions, so this advancement is expected to improve their accuracy.

E3SM will be used to compute climate sensitivity to elevated greenhouse gases. A global storm-resolving model configuration will be used alongside a novel hybrid multiscale modeling framework configuration that combines a storm-resolving model with conventional low-resolution global dynamics; the ultimate aim is to quantify the degree to which these new capabilities improve on the predictive power of conventional Earth system models.