CMCC Seminar
June 19 – h 16:00 CEST | This seminar will be conducted online only at this Zoom link (passcode 787542)

Speaker:
Milena Veneziani, Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) is a state-of-the-science Earth system model (ESM) funded by the US Department of Energy to investigate energy-relevant science such as energy- and water-security scenarios in a changing climate. In all its model components (ocean, sea ice, atmosphere, land, and river model), E3SM has the ability to focus horizontal resolution in specific areas of the globe. Regionally refined models are employed to help explicitly resolve, rather than parameterize, relevant physics within the resolution-refined regions, and offer significant computational cost savings relative to running equivalent high-resolution (HR) global ESM configurations. Here, we present results from an Arctic regionally refined fully-coupled E3SM configuration (E3SM-Arctic), with the highest resolution over the Arctic/subarctic of 10 km in the ocean and sea-ice models, and 25 km in the atmosphere and land models, transitioning to standard (1deg) resolution elsewhere. We find that the simulations generally increase the realism of simulated Arctic conditions compared to low-resolution E3SM results without the Arctic regional refinement (E3SM-LR). Some specific aspects, such as the upper ocean stratification in shallow seas (e.g., Chukchi) and the sea-ice thickness distribution, would benefit from further improvements through either model tuning, additional grid refinements, or more advanced parameterizations. Aside from these preliminary results, I will also present on some lessons learned and outline science studies that our group is planning with the E3SM-Arctic simulations.