E3SM-Project/E3SM: E3SM v1.0

First public release of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model.

The E3SM atmosphere model (EAM) is based on the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5): the spectral-element (SE) dynamical core was chosen as the default instead of an option, cloud microphysics, shallow convection, and turbulence parameterizations were replaced; the aerosol parameterization was enhanced substantially, and the vertical resolution was more than doubled (30 to 72 levels). The physics parameterizations have been tested and well-tuned for both low- and high-resolution applications, which is important for addressing our v1 water cycle question.

The E3SM land model (ELM) is based on the Community Land Model Version 4.5 (CLM4.5): new options for representing soil hydrology and biogeochemistry were added to enable analysis of structural uncertainty, with important implications to carbon-climate feedbacks for addressing our v1 biogeochemistry question.

E3SM v1 includes new ocean, sea ice, and land ice models, all based on the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) that uses Spherical Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations (SVTs) for multi-resolution modeling, which is important for addressing our v1 cryosphere question focusing on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The river transport model is Model for Scale Adaptive River Transport (MOSART), for a physically based representation of riverine processes. MOSART can operate on regular lat/lon grids or using watersheds as the computational units.

For more information see http://e3sm.org