The Aims
ENES is intended
- to help in the development and evaluation of state-of-the-art climate and Earth system models,
- to facilitate focused model intercomparisons in order to assess and improve these models,
- to encourage exchanges of software and model results, and
- to help in the development of high performance computing facilities dedicated to long high-resolution multi-model ensemble integrations.
ENES has developed and implemented the EC-supported PRISM project. The purpose of PRISM was the development of a flexible model structure in Europe with interchangeable model components, standard interfaces and a universal coupler.
Today PRISM provides the Earth System Modelling community with a forum to promote shared software infrastructure tools. The ever increasing complexity of Earth System Models and computing facilities is a heavy technical burden on the research teams developing them. The goal of PRISM is to help share the development, maintenance and support of standards and state-of-the-art software tools to assemble, run, and analyse the results of Earth System Models based on component models (ocean, atmosphere, land surface, etc..) developed in the different climate research centres in Europe and elsewhere. PRISM is organised as a distributed network of experts who contribute to five "PRISM Areas of Expertise" (PAE): Code coupling and I/O, Integration and modelling environments, Data processing, visualisation and management, Meta-data, and Computing issues.
ENES also helped establish the ENSEMBLES project. About 70 European and International insitutions joined efforts to
- Develop an ensemble prediction system for climate change based on the principal state-of-the-art, high resolution, global and regional Earth System models developed in Europe, validated against quality controlled, high resolution gridded datasets for Europe, to produce for the first time, an objective probabilistic estimate of uncertainty in future climate at the seasonal to decadal and longer timescales
- Quantify and reduce the uncertainty in the representation of physical, chemical, biological and human-related feedbacks in the Earth System (including water resource, land use, and air quality issues, and carbon cycle feedbacks)
- Maximise the exploitation of the results by linking the outputs of the ensemble prediction system to a range of applications, including agriculture, health, food security, energy, water resources, insurance and weather risk management
ENES also supports the PACE initiative recently funded to foster High Perfomance Computing on a European scale. A press release concerning PACE is available here.