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First-Ever Full Earth System Simulation Provides New Tool to Understand Climate Change
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-full-earth-simulation-tool-climate.html [phys.org]
Climate change is responsible for more extreme hurricanes, more destructive wildfires, severe droughts, and increased human disease, among other harmful outcomes. Experts warn that if carbon emissions are not significantly reduced within a few decades, the damage to Earth's ecosystem will be irreversible.
Among the most effective tools scientists have developed to understand climate change are digital simulations of Earth. These simulations are produced by developing specific algorithms to run on the world's most powerful supercomputers. But simulating how human activity influences the climate has been an extraordinarily difficult challenge.
A mind-boggling number of variables need to be taken into consideration—such as the cycles of water, energy, and carbon, how those factors relate to each other, and how diverse physical, biological, and chemical processes interact over space and time. For these reasons, previous state-of-the-art simulations have not been able to achieve what is referred to as a "Full Earth System" simulation.
The Gordon Bell Climate Prize-winning team reached a landmark this year by being the first team ever to develop a Full Earth Simulation at 1 km (extremely high) Resolution. In their introduction, they explain, "We present the first-ever global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km grid spacing, achieving highest time compression with an unseen number of degrees of freedom.
"Our model captures the flow of energy, water, and carbon through key components of the Earth system: atmosphere, ocean, and land. To achieve this landmark simulation, the team harnessed the power of 8192 GPUs on Alps and 4096 GPUs on JUPITER, two of the world's largest GH200 superchip installations."
The innovations the team employed to make the Full Earth Simulation possible include: exploiting functional parallelism by efficiently mapping components to specialized heterogeneous systems and simplifying the implementation and optimization of an important component by separating its implementation in Fortran from the optimization details of the target architecture.
In the conclusion to their paper they write, "This has enormous and enduring potential to provide full global Earth system information on local scales about the implications of future warming for both people and eco-systems, information that otherwise would not exist."
More information: Daniel Klocke et al, Computing the Full Earth System at 1km Resolution, Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3712285.3771789 [doi.org]
