Contribution received to the FET Flagships consultation: A Flagship European Programme on Extreme Computing and Climate

Author(s): Tim Palmer + 20 Leading European Climate Scientists

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At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, leaders from 194 countries of the world unanimously acknowledged the serious threat posed by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Society must now become resilient to changes in climate over coming decades. Most importantly, this will require quantitative estimates of the changing character of climate extremes. Such extremes include not only exceptional weather events such as violent wind storms and flash floods, but also persistent anomalies in planetary-­‐scale circulation patterns, which lead to pervasive flooding in some regions and seasons, and long-­‐lived drought and extremes of heat in others. However, providing such information will require a step change in the quality of global climate models, which at present are simply not adequate for this purpose (1). In particular, the resolution of these models must increase to a level which allows both ocean eddies and individual cloud systems to become represented explicitly; this is the best hope for obviating long standing climate model biases.

Such capability can begin to be realised with the advent of exascale supercomputing (1018 floating point operations per second) anticipated around 2023. However, being able to realise exaFLOPS for practical applications will require considerable investment in climate modelling software. Indeed, such is the complexity of current climate system models, such an endeavour will require a pooling of expertise and resources from existing climate institutes. Here we argue for a European Flagship Programme On Extreme Computing and Climate. Drawing on existing climate modelling expertise in Europe and working closely with existing supercomputing centres, EPECC (pronounced “Epic”) would oversee the development of cloud-­‐ and eddy-­‐resolved global climate system models, and integration of these models into an extreme-­‐scale computing technology platform. Over the term of the programme, EPECC deliverables would be tailor-­‐made for simulating climate extremes accurately on exaFLOP compute infrastructure. The key scientific focus for EPECC will be the drivers of changing extremes in Europe over the 21st century. EPECC will work in cooperation with national meteorological and oceanographic agencies, to provide information tailored to the needs of their clients in the public and private sector, with the aim of increasing European resilience to a changing climate.

1) http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/472/2188/20150772.full?ijkey

Read full text : https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/system/files/ged/epecc-final_0.pdf

You can add your comments on this topic at:  https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/content/flagship-european-programme-ext...