Santander Meteorology Group

A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate

IS-ENES3 will deliver the third phase of the distributed e-infrastructure of the European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES). IS-ENES3 will be initiated as the European climate modelling community faces the challenges of contributing to the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change through the 6 th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. IS-ENES3 will address these challenges by developing, documenting and deploying new and advanced models and tools, standards and services to deal with unprecedented data volumes and model complexity.

IS-ENES3 will stimulate collaboration, disseminate software and data, and further integrate the European climate science community. IS-ENES3 will support climate research, climate impact science, and the climate services industry. It will bring down barriers of access, and expand the community who can exploit the data and
knowledge produced by state-of-the-art climate models. In doing so, it will find innovative ways of working with the Copernicus programme, other parts of the European data infrastructure, and with the high performance computing and data analytics industries.

IS-ENES3 will be delivered by partners combining expertise in climate modelling, computational science, data management, climate impacts and climate services, with proven ability to increase the influence of European science internationally. It will deliver the European part of the Earth System Grid Federation and a central point of entry to services providing access to new data, software, models and tools. Joint research will support a new community sea ice model, promote efficient use of high-performance computing, improve the European
common model evaluation framework, and develop and enhance services on data. Networking will grow the user base, increase the cohesion of the climate modelling community, promote innovation and prepare for a long term sustainable infrastructure in support of climate modelling.

Objectives
IS-ENES3 is the third phase of the infrastructure project of ENES, the European Network for Earth System modelling (https://enes.org). ENES gathers the European community developing and using climate models of the Earth system and their data. Collectively, ENES has a mandate to better understand past and present-day climate and to project future variability and changes under anthropogenic and natural forcing. This community is a key player in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and provides the
multi-model climate projections on which EU mitigation and adaptation policies are built. Since 2009, IS-ENES (https://is.enes.org) (i) fosters collaboration among the modelling groups to speed-up the development of models of the complex Earth‟s climate system, namely “Earth System models” (ESMs); (ii)
delivers common strategies for research infrastructures; and (iii) facilitates the sharing of data archives and high-performance computing facilities.

The ENES community faces new challenges as a result of increased model complexity, the challenges of emerging computing platforms and the need to exploit ever-increasing volume and complexity of data by new, multi-disciplinary audiences, to address the climate change societal challenge. IS-ENES3 tackles these challenges through a distributed e-infrastructure of shared models components, tools and data infrastructures. ENES activities support the World Climate Research Program (WCRP, See Letter of Support in Appendix of
Section 4) as well as contributing to the standards for data and metadata required for WCRP's international repository - the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF).

During its first phase (2009-2013), IS-ENES supported the 5 th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), the results of which have been extensively used in the 5 th IPCC Assessment Report. In its second phase, IS-ENES2 (2013-2017) extended its data infrastructure support to include results from regional climate models within the WCRP Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiments (CORDEX, See Letter of Support in Appendix of section 4) covering Europe and Africa. In both phases, IS-ENES facilitated access to climate model results for the research community studying impacts of climate change; this led to the development of the climate4impact platform 1 . IS-ENES and IS-ENES2 have also facilitated the sharing of expertise on software tools needed to develop, run and exploit climate models. A first ENES community infrastructure strategy for the period 2012-2022 was developed and published (Mitchell et. al. 2012) and updated during IS-ENES2 (Joussaume et al, 2018).

IS-ENES3 will be initiated as the European climate modelling community faces the challenges of contributing to the next IPCC assessment report (See letter of Support from IPCC Working Group I in Appendix of Section 4) through the 6 th phase of CMIP (CMIP6). IS-ENES3 will address these by developing, documenting and deploying new and advanced tools and services for models, model evaluation and data distribution to deal with unprecedented large data volumes. The solid experience acquired in previous phases of IS-ENES will be a strong asset for IS-ENES3. The current project is organised around three main objectives with the overall goal of providing the infrastructure to better understand and project climate variability and change through technical excellence.

Objective 1: IS-ENES3 will pursue the integration of the Earth‘s climate system modelling community
and will prepare the sustainability of its infrastructure. It will:

• Establish stronger ties with parties either underrepresented within, or relatively new to, the ENES community, in particular through training and schools (e.g. groups in Eastern Europe and the impact modelling community);
• Build on existing governance and communication activities to prepare a sustainable infrastructure by developing a robust stakeholder consensus on downstream user requirements;
• Strengthen existing collaborations with third parties, and developing new relationships and synergies with other infrastructures, projects, initiatives, and communities, particularly those where IS-ENES knowledge and/or services will bring wider impact;
• Develop a strategy for the infrastructure needed by the ENES community in the next decade seeking opportunities for interoperability among infrastructures.

Objective 2: IS-ENES3 will foster the common development of models and tools, and the efficient use of HPC. It will:

• Create sustainable communities through the coordination of network and joint research activities;
• Develop common, sustainable model infrastructure, including support for relatively new software tools evaluated in previous phases;
• Where possible, share development of common model components, with a focus on developing a common European sea ice model and on improving the computational performance of the European ocean platform;
• Promote the use of new metrics for evaluating model computational performance aimed at understanding the relative efficiency of codes and how best to use available HPC;
• Provide community leadership and knowledge exchange, aimed at responding to the existing strategy, and improving the exploitation of HPC both nationally and internationally (e.g. ENES use of PRACE);
• Explore new avenues and tools, such as Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Objective 3: IS-ENES3 will support the exploitation of model data by the Earth system science community, the climate change impact community and the climate service community. It will:

• Maintain and develop the European component of the global Earth System Grid Federation with the
  aim of supporting the 6 th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), expected to
  require storing and supporting access to tens of petabytes of data;
• Develop a new service to ease multi-model data analytics;
• Put the infrastructure and governance of key metadata and data standards (e.g. Climate Forecast conventions for NetCDF, documentation of models and simulations) onto a sustainable footing
• Raise the standard for Earth system model evaluation by gathering more detailed understanding of user requirements, by promoting standards for the science provenance, and by developing a state-of-the-art community European model evaluation framework;
• Invest in the operation and development of the climate4impact platform and the underlying services to enable customised access to data, documentation, and information about model evaluation to the climate impact community as well as climate service businesses and consultancies.