1. Recommended proposal structure: (a) Research Activities: 10 pages (All) (b) Research Instrumentation and Needs: 2 pages (Wessel/Zender) (c) Impact of Infrastructure Projects: 2 pages (Prather) (d) Project and management Plans: 1 page (Zender) 2. Strategic questions: (a) Email Sandy Shore and Russ Kelz seeking support for ATM proposal (b) According to Schmoltner, “big project” threshold is $800–900k, we are at $876,887

This proposal asks for funds to purchase a high-performance computer and storage system as the center of the UCI Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF). The UCI ESMF will be devoted to the integration, synthesis, and analysis of large models and datasets required to advance fundamental understanding of the coupled physical climate, chemistry, and biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system. The ESMF represents a major enhancement in computational capability over the workstation-based and older shared-memory resources currently in use at UCI. It is tailored for the merging of ESM components (e.g., atmospheric chemistry, ocean biology, land hydrology) that normally consume the available computing resources of individual research projects. Although primarily a development facility for faculty and graduate researchers, the ESMF will produce the decade-long simulations of the coupled system that are needed for basic scientiﬁc studies. In terms of computing power, the ESMF ﬁts between our individual PI and school-based resources and national modeling facilities (e.g., NCAR, SDSC), but in terms of development it is unique. The UCI ESMF ﬁlls a niche, allowing faculty, post-graduates, and students to work with high-performance computing in an environment where they control the computer and the code development.

Intellectual Merits. The process of coupling existing ESM components will identify some of the more important feedbacks and help identify aspects of the models that need attention or further development. The ESMF will also be used operationally (i.e., 100-year simulations) with component subsets of the full ESM, to address some outstanding questions about feedbacks anticipated with global change in the 21st century. Three subset-ESMs are planned for the early development: aerosol/gas chemistry, physical climate, and land+ocean biogeochemistry; catchment-scale riverine nutrient transport, Aeolian erosion, and marine ecosystems; and ocean and land surface memory eﬀects on the predictability of the hydrologic cycle. These subset-ESMs will provide new insights (and problems) as we explore scientiﬁc questions that highlight the new capability of coupling these components. The initial subset-ESMs will produce new scientiﬁc results which will be pursued in operational studies with the full ESM. The ESMF will foster interdisciplinary collaborations between research groups which bring together an extremely wide breadth of scientiﬁc expertise in developing, analyzing and improving a coupled Earth System Model. These improvements will feed back into national modeling eﬀorts. The ESMF will be maintained as a multi-user resource as part of the UCI Department of Earth System Science (ESS). The primary users of the ESMF are UCI ESS Professors Famiglietti, Magnusdottir, Moore, Prather, Primeau, Yu, and Zender, and their associated researchers, post-doctoral fellows, students and collaborators.

Broader Impacts. Development of ESMs is essential if the public is to understand the full implications of climate change and make the best informed political decisions regarding adaptation and mitigation. Integration of the human dimensions side of global change needs the details provided by an ESM rather than the reduced dimensions of integrated assessment models. Work at UCI’s ESMF will contribute to ESMs around the globe. As an academic center for ESM development, the ESMF will train the next generation of scientists and research staﬀ in applying high-performance computing to large, coupled models and datasets in the Earth sciences. The ESS Department’s undergraduate curriculum encourages research projects, and the ESMF will sustain computing projects for several undergraduates. The ESMF will establish projects with UCI’s Center for Educational Partnerships (CFEP), which links Southern California agencies including school districts, parents, and community colleges. ESMF projects will also bring in students from a nearby Minority Serving Institution, California State University at Bakersﬁeld (CSUB), giving these students access to environmental science models, data, and mentors unavailable at CSUB.

1 Introduction

Faculty of the UCI Department of Earth System Science (ESS) propose to acquire a high performance computer and storage system to become the UCI Earth System Modeling Facility (ESMF). The UCI ESMF will be devoted to the integration, synthesis, and analysis of large geophysical models and datasets required to advance fundamental understanding of the coupled climate, chemical, and biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System. The ESMF represents a major enhancement in computational capability over the workstation-based and older shared-memory resources currently in use at UCI. It is tailored for the merging of ESM components (e.g., atmospheric chemistry, ocean biology, land hydrology) that—within each PI’s research—normally consume the available computing resources of individual research projects. The ESMF is optimized for providing highly cached, shared-memory computing for each component, with more relaxed requirements for parallel computation and communication between the diﬀerent ESM components.

In our recent experience with national and international assessments of climate, key questions were unanswerable because of the lack of capability in integrating coupled climate system models, speciﬁcally the capability that the ESMF will provide. The scientiﬁc expertise in these individual areas of Earth system science exists within the ESS department, and its members are primary contributors to coupled Earth system models being assembled in many places. Yet there is no computational facility in the US where a group of researchers with the breadth and depth of the PIs can easily collaborate on science arising from the coupling of Earth system climate, chemical, and biogeochemical cycles. In terms of computing power, the proposed ESMF ﬁts between our individual PI and school-based resources and national modeling facilities (e.g., NCAR, SDSC), but in terms of development it is unique. The UCI ESMF ﬁlls a niche, allowing faculty, post-graduates, and students to work with high-performance computing in an environment where they control the computer and the code development.

Although primarily a development facility for faculty and graduate researchers, the ESMF will produce the decade-long simulations of the coupled system that are needed for basic scientiﬁc studies. An important component of the ESMF is the dedicated disk space for data synthesis and analysis. In the next three years ESS researchers will require uninterrupted access to 30–100 terabytes (TB) of data to keep pace with the increases in temporal, spatial, and spectral resolutions of remote sensing measurements and coupled climate system models. This ESMF will allow ESS researchers to pursue data-intensive research utilizing the large geophysical datasets from current and next generation numerical models and satellite observations.

1.1 Personnel Directly Involved with the ESMF

The principle researchers making use of the ESMF are the research groups of UCI Earth System Science Professors Magnusdottir, Moore, Prather, Primeau, Yu, Zender, and Famiglietti (joint with Civil Engineering): 1. Graduate students: J. Abatzoglou, A. Berg, S. Bortz, L.-M. Chen, M. Flanner, E. Kwon, Y. Hu, J.-W. Lee, D. Ryu, H. Syed, C.-C. Wang 2. Post-Docs: H. Bian, J. Hsu 3. Researchers: S. Holl, X. Ma, D. Newman, S. Tyler, X. Zhu 4. Undergraduates: S. Bamattre and others unnamed

The PIs have committed to coordinate modeling and experimental research around hypotheses and experiments testable using a uniﬁed Earth System Model (ESM). These faculty (see attached bio-sketches) have identiﬁed speciﬁc research projects (Section 2.2, below) that take advantage of the ESMF.

Other faculty anticipate using the ESMF in support their research activities in the near future. These include Professors Blake (Chemistry, Using ESMF simulations to evaluate aircraft-measured trace gases in support of ﬁeld programs), Dabdub (Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Using ESMF to provide boundary conditions for nested regional air quality modeling), Druﬀel (ESS, Comparing ESMF simulations with long term coral

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measurements), Friehe (MAE, Comparing measured and ESMF-modeled air sea exchange), Smecker-Hane (Physics and Astronomy), and Smyth (Information and Computer Science, Fitting hidden Markov models to observations and ESMF simulations of precipitation and storm tracks), and Trumbore (ESS, Understanding terrestrial C cycling using ESMF-simulations and soil

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measurements). The ESMF will be maintained as a multi-user ESS departmental resource.

1.2 Proposal Organization

Section 2 describes the research opportunities the PIs will take advantage of with the ESMF. Section 3 describes why our current computational resources are inadequate to perform this research. Then we describe the computational requirements of an ESMF suitable for solving the coupled climate-biogeochemistry problems that are our highest priority. Section 4 describes the broader impacts of the ESMF on society, research training, and minority opportunities at UCI. Section 5 concludes with the plans for ESMF administration and future maintenance. Appendices contain the Budget Justiﬁcation, two vendor quotes, a parts list, a Research Facilities statement, letters of support from CSUB, the UCI IGPP and VCR, and a list of Acronyms and Abbreviations.

1.3 Results from Prior NSF Funding

2 Impact of facility on current and proposed research

2.1 Coupled Earth System Modeling at UCI

To enhance coupled Earth System research at UCI, ESS researchers have agreed to coordinate modeling and experimental research around hypotheses and experiments testable using a uniﬁed Earth System Model (ESM). Many ESM components will be based on the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) coordinated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Blackmon et al. (2001). The ESMF will be used to study and extend climate related tracers and biogeochemical sub-models in the existing CCSM. This allows us to focus on the cutting edge science while building on a state-of-the-art climate system model. The depth of Earth System modeling at UCI has reached a critical mass where we can now leverage eachother’s expertise to make fundamental advances the coupled Earth system.

The PIs will use the ESMF to coordinate and direct their autonomous modeling research into a fully coupled Earth System Model eﬀort at a faster pace than can be done through collaborating through external groups such as Community Climate System Model (CCSM) working groups (WGs) (Blackmon et al., 2001). These WGs decide where improvements and extensions are needed in the CCSM, coordinate scientiﬁc strategies to meet these needs, allocate computational resources to test competing physics packages, and evaluate the results. The ESMF is dedicated to the design and initial scientiﬁc application of next generation couplings (cf. Table 2) that are led by UCI. ESMF researchers are active members of several CCSM WGs, including the Atmospheric Model (AMWG), Biogeochemistry (BGCWG), Climate Variability (CVWG), and Land Model (LMWG) groups. The ESMF will facilitate progress and ease student involvement and training in UCI focus areas across these WGs, so the ESMF is complementary to CCSM WGs. Our improvements to ESM components will feed back into national modeling eﬀorts such as CCSM and NASA’s Global Modeling Initiative (GMI) through our strong associations with these eﬀorts. Thus any negative impact of the ESMF on existing national collaborations of the PIs is expected to be minimal and outweighed by the positive impact of ESMF contributions to these eﬀorts.

Why are we not pursuing the research outlined below at a remote supercomputer location (such as NCAR or SDSC) open to proposals for large scale Earth system computational projects? We will address this question directly and state our reasons for establishing the ESMF: 1. UCI’s research niche: The ESMF is for focused research on coupled next generation biogeochemistry-climate problems. The PIs have unique strength in linking chemistry, biogeochemistry, and climate cycles together. 2. Scale of research: ESMF experiments will leverage control simulations from external centers. 3. Unfettered collaboration: The ESMF is devoted to quick turnaround (order one week) projects to enable university researchers to dynamically pursue interesting hypotheses without excessive administrative overhead. 4. Diﬀerent resolution, more free parameters, and quicker turnaround 5. Responsiveness: Being on-site, the ESMF will be responsive to our speciﬁc science and teaching needs. Students and researchers will gain valuable experience implementing and analyzing their own experiments.

In contrast to external centers such as NCAR and SDSC, the ESMF is designed as a dedicated facility for a group of close-knit collaborators. Our mission is to develop the physical and chemical couplings required to address unanswered questions.

One way we will use the ESMF is studying climate and biogeochemical feedbacks of a particular component of the Earth System where the remainder of the system is represented by the standard NCAR CCSM. The CCSM provides an eﬃcient, well-documented base upon which to pursue innovative modeling studies. CCSM components run in both stand-alone and coupled mode, and already contain with many biogeochemical, hydrologic, and radiative improvements developed and contributed by UCI researchers. Table 1 shows the relations between the ESMF models, research areas, and researchers.

Table 1:

Purpose and Users of Primary ESMF Models


Inst.^a & Model	Name and ESMF Purpose	UCI^b	CCSM^c	IPCC^d	Users^e





NCAR CCSM^f	Comm. Climat Sys. Model	$\times$	$\times$	$\times$	All

NCAR CAM	Comm. Atmosphere Model	$\times$	$\times$	$\times$	Magnus., Zender

NCAR CLM^g	Common Land Model	$\times$	$\times$		Famig., Zender

LANL CSIM	Comm. Sea Ice Model		$\times$		Magnusdottir

UCI DEAD^h	Dust Entrainment & Depos.	$\times$	$\times$		Zender, Moore

NCAR POP	Parallel Ocean Program		$\times$	$\times$	Moore, Prim., Yu

UCI OEMⁱ	Ocean Ecosystem Model	$\times$	$\times$		Moore

UCI CTM^j	Chem. Transport Model	$\times$		$\times$	Prather, Zender

UCI RTM^k	River Transport Model	$\times$	$\times$		Famiglietti

UCLA CGCM^l	Coupled GCM	$\times$			Yu, Primeau

UCLA NCOM^m	Upper ocean model	$\times$			Yu, Moore