Earth System Modelling with Galaxy

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) from the National Center for Atmospheric Research is a fully-coupled, community, global climate model allowing state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present and future climates. The Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) builds on it, with major changes in the aerosol-cloud chemistry (developed at the Meteorological Institute and University of Oslo), the ocean and its biogeochemistry (originally Miami Isopycnic Coordinate Ocean Model and  Hamburg Model of Ocean Carbon Cycle, respectively, modified at the University of Bergen, Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, and Norwegian Research Center AS). In addition schemes are implemented to compute turbulent atmosphere-ocean fluxes, for atmospheric energy and momentum conservation, etc.

Basically CESM/NorESM are composed of separate components to simulate the Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land, river run-off, land-ice, and sea-ice, plus one central coupler/moderator synchronizing exchanges between them. CESM/NorESM make it possible to conduct fundamental research into the biological, geophysical and chemical processes governing the system and to explore socioeconomic scenarios for instance in Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIPs). 

Users of CESM/NorESM (or similar models) do not have the same computational resource needs. On the one side production (to simulate hundreds or thousands of years) demand maximum power (in Petaflops range) which only large national and European High-Performance Computers (HPCs) can deliver. On the other side, for model developments, debugging, testing and validation as well as for teaching purposes what matters most is a flexible framework. For post-processing, analysis and visualization of model data, co-location of the tools (Jupyter notebooks, as an example) and data is paramount to avoid transfers. When it comes to collaborations and reproducible research, sine qua non conditions are the possibility of sharing files and using the same run-time environment.

Far from competing against HPCs in terms of sheer computing power, Galaxy is nonetheless capable of satisfying the everyday needs of the vast majority of CESM/NorESM users described hereinabove, thereby becoming an asset in environmental research communities. Galaxy/Live with its Interactive Climate JupyterLab offers:

• a Virtual Laboratory for developing, testing and deploying climate model workflows before they are ready to go in production on larger systems, as well as for training, to instill the fundamentals of the Earth System;

a Data analysis platform for analyzing and visualizing Climate data produced by researchers as well as from national and international projects such as CMIP, the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) and/or Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).