The Disruptive Potential of Climate Models on the Cloud: SilverLining, ASDI, and NCAR @COP26
Last year, SilverLining hosted an event at COP26 focused on a critically important and not widely known problem in climate research: the centrality of high-performance computing for climate modeling and research and the effects of current limitations on availability and access to climate models.
I joined three impressive and engaging subject matter experts — Ana Pinheiro Privette of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), Jean-Francois Lamarque of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Chris Lennard of the Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG) at the University of Cape Town — for a panel discussion focused on a joint effort of SilverLining, NCAR, and ASDI to undertake the first-ever full production climate model simulations on the cloud and the implications for accelerating science and addressing a major area of inequity.
The complexity of the Earth system makes climate model simulations and projections extremely difficult and computing-intensive — a major bottleneck for climate research. This issue has restricted access to model simulations and the petabytes of data they produce to a small number of researchers with access to supercomputing facilities in government laboratories or select universities, mostly in western countries.
Through our partnership with ASDI and NCAR in the Safe Climate Research Initiative (SCRI), SilverLining is supporting a groundbreaking effort to include the first-ever full-production climate-model simulations on the cloud through ASDI, which is supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. See more about the initiative here.
Our panel discussed how AWS’ cloud capabilities will allow Jean-Francois and his collaborators at NCAR and elsewhere to perform simulations of the Earth system from 2035–2070 under a median scenario for warming (RCP 4.5) alongside simulations that will include the distribution of particles in the stratosphere to counter warming.
The ASDI team is focused on ensuring that this first-ever implementation on the cloud sets a precedent for running large climate models in an environment where anyone could access and use them. The data gathered from these simulations will be hosted through the ASDI program, providing open access to researchers around the world to study the various impacts on earth and human systems.
The importance of expanding access to global climate models and datasets beyond traditional supercomputing centers within select countries and institutions cannot be understated. The access enabled by the cloud will allow local scientists and researchers the ability to examine the impacts of warming and potential responses in their own regions of the world in ways they are unable to today.
Chris drove this point home, stating the new access to climate models and datasets “has huge potential to capacitate developing nation scientists to actually do good research, publish in good journals, and get into the academic playing field because we’re really not there yet compared, to say, the U.S. and European and Australian researchers.”
Accelerating capabilities for climate science is a critical part of SilverLining’s effort to address near-term climate risk. Partnering with Amazon, NCAR, and others to work on technology innovation for science is one of the important ways we at SilverLining help create leverage for rapid progress on understanding and responding to climate change.
Watch the video to meet these impressive (and entertaining) speakers and to get a more complete picture of the issues and these efforts. Stay tuned for updates as these massive simulations are completed, and we follow the science. You can also find more information here.
