DOE Launches Major 10-Year Project to Use High Performance Computing for Climate Change Research - ACME

Eight national laboratories—Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Sandia—are combining forces with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, four academic institutions and one private-sector company in a 10-year project to use high performance computing (HPC) to develop and to apply the most complete climate and Earth system model.

The project, called Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME), is designed to accelerate the development and application of fully coupled, state-of-the-science Earth system models for scientific and energy applications. The plan is to exploit advanced software and new high performance computing machines as they become available.  The initial focus will be on three climate change science drivers and corresponding questions to be answered during the project’s initial phase:

• Water Cycle:  How do the hydrological cycle and water resources interact with the climate system on local to global scales?  How will more realistic portrayals of features important to the water cycle (resolution, clouds, aerosols, snowpack, river routing, land use) affect river flow and associated freshwater supplies at the watershed scale?
  
  A goal of ACME is to simulate the changes in the hydrological cycle, with a specific focus on precipitation and surface water in orographically (associated with or induced by the presence of mountains) complex regions such as the western United States and the headwaters of the Amazon.
  


• Biogeochemistry:  How do biogeochemical cycles interact with global climate change?  How do carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles regulate climate system feedbacks, and how sensitive are these feedbacks to model structural uncertainty?
  
  To address biogeochemistry, ACME researchers will examine how more complete treatments of nutrient cycles affect carbon-climate system feedbacks, with a focus on tropical systems, and investigate the influence of alternative model structures for below-ground reaction networks on global-scale biogeochemistry-climate feedbacks.


• Cryosphere Systems:  How do rapid changes in cryospheric systems, or areas of the earth where water exists as ice or snow, interact with the climate system? Could a dynamical instability in the Antarctic Ice Sheet be triggered within the next 40 years?
  
  For cryosphere, the team will examine the near-term risks of initiating the dynamic instability and onset of the collapse of the Antarctic Ice Sheet due to rapid melting by warming waters adjacent to the ice sheet grounding lines.

DOE Launches Major 10-Year Project to Use High Performance Computing for Climate Change Research - ACME