EOSC-Nordic enhances the accuracy of Earth System Models

To predict the long-term effects of climate change, researchers implement Earth System Models (ESMs). ESMs are crucial for climate scientists as they enable to depict human influence on climate, for instance by deforestation or greenhouse gas emissions. By simulating the interactions between winds, clouds, oceans, and other natural phenomena, ESMs create different scenarios of the future. These projections serve as an important basis for political decision-making, internationally as well as nationally and locally. The computing power required to run such models is enormous, so large supercomputers are the only possible computational resources for ESM research.

Nordic climate scientists need to harness ESMs to create better and more precise predictions for the region, and this is where the NICEST-2 project comes in. NICEST-2 is the second phase of the Nordic Collaboration on e-Infrastructures for Earth System Modelling with focus on strengthening the Nordic position within climate modelling by leveraging, reinforcing and complementing ongoing initiatives. NICEST-2 will enhance the performance and optimize workflows used, so climate models can be run in an efficient way on high-performance computing resources, such as LUMI system in Finland and other EuroHPC supercomputers. As reported previously, from October 2021 until April 2022, EOSC-Nordic scientist Anne Fouilloux and her team had access to LUMI to perform calculations for the climate use case in the EOSC-Nordic project. „For EOSC-Nordic, it means that we are ready to deploy Earth System Models as-a-service on the European Open Science Cloud that can use cloud computing, HPC-cloud computing and EuroHPC computing. Therefore, we are ready for Open Science,” she explained.

There are two EOSC-Nordic use cases that aim at serving the NICEST-2 project.

Use case 1: A community virtual laboratory for developing climate diagnostics for the Nordics

The goal of the first use case is to widen the usage and expertise on evaluating ESMs by developing a novel Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) diagnostics for the Nordic regions. With new tools, researchers will be able to compare outputs from different climate models in the Nordic countries in order to identify deficiencies and develop strategies to improve the models e.g. EC-EARTH and NorESM. There is also need for development of teaching material for learning how to use ESMValTool diagnostics over the Nordic regions. This use case is a collaboration project between the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, NORCE and NERSC (Norway), University of Oslo, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), and University of Helsinki/INAR (Finland).

Use case 2: FAIR climate data for the Nordics

NICEST-s aims to provide FAIR climate data to all the communities interested in assessment of climate change impact and climate change mitigation. FAIRificated climate data would be usable not only for scientists but also for local authorities, policy makers and general public alike. Achieving this goal involves a variety of actions, such as deployment of tools for visualizing climate data over the Nordics from Galaxy and deployment of statistical tools for characterizing climate change in the Nordic countries. This use case is owned by Dr Hamish Struthers (National Supercomputing Centre, Sweden). Partners involved in the use case include National Supercomputing Centre (Sweden), Danish Meteorological Institute, IT Centre for Science (Finland), NORCE (Norway), The Norwegian Meteorological Institute and University of Iceland.