A. Stephens

High-resolution global climate modelling: the UPSCALE project, a large-simulation campaign

The UPSCALE (UK on PRACE: weatherresolving Simulations of Climate for globAL Environmental risk) project constructed and ran an ensemble of HadGEM3 (Hadley Centre Global Environment Model 3) atmosphereonly global climate simulations over the period 1985–2011, at resolutions of N512 (25 km), N216 (60 km) and N96 (130 km) as used in current global weather forecasting, seasonal prediction and climate modelling respectively. Alongside these present climate simulations a parallel ensemble looking at extremes of future climate was run, using a timeslice methodology to consider conditions at the end of this century. These simulations were primarily performed using a 144 million core hour, single year grant of computing time from PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) in 2012, with additional resources supplied by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Met Office. Almost 400 terabytes of simulation data were generated on the HERMIT supercomputer at the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), and transferred to the JASMIN super-data cluster provided by the Science and Technology Facilities Council Centre for Data Archival (STFC CEDA) for analysis and storage. In this paper we describe the implementation of the project, present the technical challenges in terms of optimisation, data output, transfer and storage that such a project involves and include details of the model configuration and the composition of the UPSCALE data set. This data set is available for scientific analysis to allow assessment of the value of model resolution in both present and potential future climate conditions.

The challenges of developing an open source, standards-based technology stack to deliver the latest UK climate projections

Abstract To improve the understanding of local and regional effects of climate change, the UK government supported the development of new climate projections. The Met Office Hadley Centre produced a sophisticated set of probabilistic projections for future climate. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an interactive website to deliver those projections to a broad user community. The interface presents complex data sets, generates on-the-fly products and schedules jobs to an offline weather generator capable of outputting gigabytes of data in response to a single request. A robust and scalable physical architecture was delivered through significant use of open source technologies and open standards.

The NERC Datagrid: enabling interoperable climate data resources

The NERC DataGrid (NDG) is a UK e-science project that provides discovery of, and virtualised access to, a wide variety of climate and earth system science data. We present an overview of key elements of the NDG architecture from a number of perspectives, from an enterprise viewpoint, to the relationship to key ISO standards, and to the underlying metadata structures. The discussion stresses the interoperability characteristics of the design, and introduces the latest experiments of interoperability with the NCAR community data portal, and plans for wider interoperability with the climate data archives held in the Earth system grid. Future initiatives, including the Big Data Analysis Network, are introduced.