CREDITS: Mark R. Petersen, Kristin Hoch, and Christie Djidjev
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Climate research at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) includes the development of ocean, sea-ice, atmosphere, land-vegetation and land-ice models. The ability to run high-resolution global simulations efficiently on the world’s largest computers is a priority for the DOE. This movie shows simulations from the variable-resolution ocean model, the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS-Ocean), which is developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. MPAS-Ocean is a component of the DOE’s newly released Energy, Exascale, Earth System Model (E3SM).

Applications of E3SM include the simulation of 20th-century and future climate scenarios, as well as special configurations where model resolution is enhanced in regions of particular interest, like coastal areas, the Arctic, or below Antarctic ice shelves.