Ongoing Projects
The DFG-funded CAP7 project supports the Fast Track phase of CMIP7, which is crucial for delivering insights to the next IPCC report. By developing on the advanced Climate and Earth system models ICON, AWI-CM3, and AWI-ESM3, CAP7 strengthens Germany’s contribution to global climate projections. These models are tailored to meet CMIP7 requirements, performing DECK simulations and enabling emission-driven projections to understand greenhouse gas impacts more accurately. Additionally, CAP7 will improve the Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) to ensure robust analysis, providing high-quality climate projections that enhance international understanding of climate change.
Laszlo Hunor Hajdu | Jan Streffing | Nadine Wieters
The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) is a groundbreaking project aimed at transforming how climate change information is delivered, helping address the complex challenges of a warming world. As part of the EU’s Destination Earth initiative, the Climate DT produces multi-decadal, high-resolution climate projections, updated frequently thanks to the powerful pre-exascale supercomputers of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). By providing globally consistent data on Earth system impacts at km-scales, the Climate DT shortens the traditional 7–10 year climate projection cycles to annual or faster updates. Additionally, it offers tailored simulations to explore “what-if” scenarios, supporting informed decision-making for climate adaptation and advancing the European Green Deal’s goals.
Mohammed Hussam Al Turjman | Miguel Andrés-Martínez | Sebastian Beyer | Thomas Jung | Himansu Kesari Pradhan | Jessica Kegel |Nikolay Koldunov | Ivan Kuznetsov | Amal John | Dimitry Sidorenko | Jan Streffing | Silva Ruppert | Jan Wehner
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Funded by the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, EERIE will reveal and quantify the role of ocean mesoscale processes in shaping the climate trajectory over seasonal to centennial time scales. To this end EERIE will develop a new generation of Earth System Models (ESMs) that are capable of explicitly representing a crucially important, yet unexplored regime of the Earth system – the ocean mesoscale. Leveraging the latest advances in science and technology, EERIE will substantially improve the ability of such ESMs to faithfully represent the centennial-scale evolution of the global climate, especially its variability, extremes and how tipping points may unfold under the influence of the ocean mesoscale.
Jan Gärtner | Rohit Ghosh | Jana Görner | Nora Lawo | Thomas Jung (coordinator) | Nikolay Koldunov | Kacper Nowak
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The HClimRep project, funded by the Helmholtz Association, aims to transform climate prediction by developing one of the first AI foundation models dedicated to climate research. This advanced model integrates data from the atmosphere, ocean, and sea ice to create one of the world’s most precise weather and climate simulation tools. Trained on Europe’s first exascale computer, HClimRep’s deep learning model, with billions of parameters, will be capable of conducting complex “what-if” experiments, enhancing our understanding of climate dynamics, and providing rapid, accurate projections. This innovation holds the potential to make the impacts of climate change more visible, enabling better strategies to combat and mitigate its effects.
Thomas Jung | Nikolay Koldunov | Kacper Nowak
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nextGEMS is a collaborative European project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, uniting expertise from fourteen nations to develop two next-generation storm-resolving Earth System Models (ICON and IFS-FESOM). These models, with a high-resolution grid capable of explicitly capturing storms, ocean eddies, and ice dynamics, represent a major advancement in climate modeling. By providing unprecedented simulation realism, nextGEMS will enable scientists to more accurately project global and regional climate changes, including future weather patterns and extreme events. This innovative approach addresses long-standing limitations in conventional models, paving the way for more reliable and physically grounded climate predictions.
Thomas Jung | Aleksei Koldunov | Nikolay Koldunov | Dmitry Sein
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WarmWorld
WarmWorld, which receives funding from BMBF, aims to transform Earth system modeling by leveraging advancements in information technology to compute and assess kilometer-scale climate trajectories. Building on an ICON-based storm-and-eddy-resolving Earth System Model (SR-ESM) and its simulation ghost IFS-FESOM), WarmWorld will create innovative workflows to make projected climate trajectory data more accessible and transparent for user communities. In parallel, it will support the harmonization of national and international efforts to provide, share, learn from, and apply the highest quality climate information.
Suvarchal Cheedela | Thomas Jung | Svetlana Loza | Dmitry Sidorenko
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The Joint Lab Exascale Earth System Modelling (JL-ExaESM) advances exascale simulations and data handling to achieve breakthroughs in climate change and extreme weather modeling and their societal and ecosystem impacts. By fostering co-design between computer and domain scientists, JL-ExaESM tackles key scientific and methodological challenges in Earth system science, leveraging exascale supercomputing for simulation and data analytics. The initiative integrates modern IT concepts such as flexible scheduling and federated, hierarchical data management to enhance model flexibility and reduce time-to-solution across the entire simulation-data analytics chain. Scientists from nine Helmholtz institutions collaborate in two core areas: Exascale Code Scalability and Exascale Workflow Scalability for Earth system modeling applications.
Suvarchal Cheedela | Thomas Jung | Dmitry Sidorenko
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TerraDT is a groundbreaking digital twin project designed to enhance our understanding of how glaciers, sea ice, vegetation, and aerosols influence the Earth’s climate. By delivering high-resolution climate impact assessments, it will provide concrete decision-making tools for local planning, such as helping determine optimal locations for shipping routes, parks, and other infrastructure. The project will leverage Europe's most advanced supercomputers to achieve unprecedented modeling accuracy.
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TRR181 is a DFG funded project about energy transfers in atmosphere and ocean.
The energy of a closed system is steady. It is not lost but rather converted into other forms, such as when kinetic energy is transferred into thermal energy or vice versa heat results in a force.
However, this fundamental principle of natural science is often still a problem for climate research. For example, in case of the calculation of ocean currents, where small-scale vortices as well as mixing processes they induce need to be considered, without fully understanding where the energy for their creation originates from. This is similar in the atmosphere, the only difference being that air is moving instead of water. Again, local turbulences can drive larger movements or vice versa waves on a larger scale can disintegrate into small structures.
All these processes are important for the Earth’s climate and determine how temperatures will rise in the future.
Deniz Aydin | Sergey Danilov | Thomas Jung | Stephan Juricke | Nikolay Koldunov | Martin Losch | Dirk Olbers | Patrick Scholz
