Cloud-resolving Sandia model shows unprecedented speed and accuracy

Running a model of the global atmosphere with unprecedentedly high resolution on the world’s first exascale supercomputer, a Sandia-led team has won the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery. The award, announced on Nov. 16 at the SC23 convention in Denver, recognizes innovative computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis.

“We have created the first global cloud-resolving model to simulate a world’s year of climate in a day,” said Sandia researcher Mark Taylor, the chief computational scientist of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM, an eight-lab project led by Lawrence Livermore National Lab and supported by the DOE’s Office of Science for the development of advanced climate models. “We’re ushering in a new era of accuracy.”

The E3SM model simulates critical aspects of Earth’s climate system that might impact conditions in the U.S. in the coming decades, including extreme temperatures, droughts, floods and a rise in sea level. Mark, who led the Gordon Bell submission, detailed the team’s record-setting demonstration of SCREAM, the Simple Cloud Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model, on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer, capable of 1.2 exaFLOP, or 1.2 quintillion, computing operations per second.

Clouds play a critical role in Earth’s climate system, impacting weather patterns and precipitation.

“Traditional Earth system models struggle to represent clouds accurately because they cannot simulate the small overturning circulation in the atmosphere responsible for cloud formation and instead rely on complex approximations of these processes,” Mark said. “This next-generation program has the potential to substantially reduce major systematic errors in precipitation found in current models because of its more realistic and explicit treatment of convective storms and the atmospheric motions responsible for cloud formation.”

Incorporating state-of-the-art parameterizations for fluid dynamics, microphysics, moist turbulence and radiation, SCREAM is a full-featured atmospheric general-circulation model developed for very fine-resolution simulations on exascale machines. The Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling, according to the Association for Computing Machinery, “aims to recognize innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis.” It was awarded for the first time this year at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, or SC23, in Denver and accompanied by a $10,000 award provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high performance computing. The Sandia-led model was selected based on its potential to impact climate modeling and related fields.

Learn more about E3SM.