The DOE E3SM Coupled Model Version 1: Overview and Evaluation at Standard Resolution

Jean Christophe Golaz, Peter M. Caldwell, Luke P. Van Roekel, Mark R. Petersen, Qi Tang, Jonathan D. Wolfe, Guta Abeshu, Valentine Anantharaj, Xylar S. Asay-Davis, David C. Bader, Sterling A. Baldwin, Gautam Bisht, Peter A. Bogenschutz, Marcia Branstetter, Michael A. Brunke, Steven R. Brus, Susannah M. Burrows, Philip J. Cameron-Smith, Aaron S. Donahue, Michael DeakinRichard C. Easter, Katherine J. Evans, Yan Feng, Mark Flanner, James G. Foucar, Jeremy G. Fyke, Brian M. Griffin, Cécile Hannay, Bryce E. Harrop, Mattthew J. Hoffman, Elizabeth C. Hunke, Robert L. Jacob, Douglas W. Jacobsen, Nicole Jeffery, Philip W. Jones, Noel D. Keen, Stephen A. Klein, Vincent E. Larson, L. Ruby Leung, Hong Yi Li, Wuyin Lin, William H. Lipscomb, Po Lun Ma, Salil Mahajan, Mathew E. Maltrud, Azamat Mametjanov, Julie L. McClean, Renata B. McCoy, Richard B. Neale, Stephen F. Price, Yun Qian, Philip J. Rasch, J. E.Jack Reeves Eyre, William J. Riley, Todd D. Ringler, Andrew F. Roberts, Erika L. Roesler, Andrew G. Salinger, Zeshawn Shaheen, Xiaoying Shi, Balwinder Singh, Jinyun Tang, Mark A. Taylor, Peter E. Thornton, Adrian K. Turner, Milena Veneziani, Hui Wan, Hailong Wang, Shanlin Wang, Dean N. Williams, Phillip J. Wolfram, Patrick H. Worley, Shaocheng Xie, Yang Yang, Jin Ho Yoon, Mark D. Zelinka, Charles S. Zender, Xubin Zeng, Chengzhu Zhang, Kai Zhang, Yuying Zhang, Xue Zheng, Tian Zhou, Qing Zhu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

This work documents the first version of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) new Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SMv1). We focus on the standard resolution of the fully coupled physical model designed to address DOE mission-relevant water cycle questions. Its components include atmosphere and land (110-km grid spacing), ocean and sea ice (60 km in the midlatitudes and 30 km at the equator and poles), and river transport (55 km) models. This base configuration will also serve as a foundation for additional configurations exploring higher horizontal resolution as well as augmented capabilities in the form of biogeochemistry and cryosphere configurations. The performance of E3SMv1 is evaluated by means of a standard set of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) Diagnosis, Evaluation, and Characterization of Klima simulations consisting of a long preindustrial control, historical simulations (ensembles of fully coupled and prescribed SSTs) as well as idealized CO2 forcing simulations. The model performs well overall with biases typical of other CMIP-class models, although the simulated Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weaker than many CMIP-class models. While the E3SMv1 historical ensemble captures the bulk of the observed warming between preindustrial (1850) and present day, the trajectory of the warming diverges from observations in the second half of the twentieth century with a period of delayed warming followed by an excessive warming trend. Using a two-layer energy balance model, we attribute this divergence to the model's strong aerosol-related effective radiative forcing (ERFari+aci = −1.65 W/m2) and high equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS = 5.3 K).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2089-2129
Number of pages41
JournalJournal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
Volume11
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019

Funding

This research was supported as part of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research with partial support from the Climate Model Development and Validation activity funded by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the US Department of Energy Office of Science. S. A. K. and M. D. Z. acknowledge support from the Regional and Global Modeling and Analysis Program of the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. J. L. M. was supported by DE-SC0012778. J.-H. Yoon was partially supported by the National Research Foundation grant: NRF_2017R1A2b4007480. We thank the following for their assistance adapting the input4MIPS CMIP6 data sets to the E3SM model: Michael Prather and Juno Hsu (Appendix), Beiping Luo (Appendix), and George Hurtt and Ritvik Sahajpal (Appendix). Simulations described in this work and most developmental simulations leading up to them relied on computational resources provided by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-05CH11231. The remaining developmental simulations used a high-performance computing cluster provided by the BER Earth System Modeling program and operated by the Laboratory Computing Resource Center at Argonne National Laboratory as well as resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Work at LLNL was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RLO1830. Some material is based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1852977. The E3SM project, code, simulation configurations, model output, and tools to work with the output are described at the website (https://e3sm.org). Instructions on how to get started running E3SM are available at the website (https://e3sm.org/model/running-e3sm/e3sm-quick-start). All model codes may be accessed on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/E3SM-Project/E3SM). Model output data are accessible directly on NERSC or through the DOE Earth System Grid Federation (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/e3sm).

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