Creating a Grid ENabled Integrated Assessment Laboratory (GENIAL)

We will integrate the GENIE and CIAS frameworks, develop the interfaces and introduce important new features to produce a Grid ENabled Integrated Assessment Laboratory (GENIAL).

GENIE-CIAS integration: A preliminary assessment by the GENIE and CIAS/softIAM e-science teams indicates that the coupling systems being used are compatible, and a scoping study will ascertain coupling requirements. Initially a whole ESM from GENIE will be wrapped as a module and the Bespoke Framework Generator extended to couple this to socio-economic modules. GENIE will pass 2D surface fields (e.g. temperature, precipitation) but initially the human component may only return a global CO2 emissions flux. Later, the passing of 2D fields (e.g. of land use change activity) from the human component back to the natural system will be introduced together with the required grid transformations. A downscaler from output that is already spatial in GENIE to finer spatial scales will be developed, based on the current CIAS downscaler CLIMGEN. The BFG will be integrated in the GENIE compile and run system. Then, in tandem with GENIE-PRISM activity, the BFG will be extended to couple natural system modules (e.g. land) that interact directly with human modules (e.g. land-use).

International compatibility: To maximise the potential number of future users, we will investigate the coupling of BFG compliant models with models that are written to comply with other frameworks, including PRISM and ESMF. Initial prototyping has shown that the BFG can be extended to support PIK's TDT communication fabric, thus allowing the coupling of native PIK TDT models with BFG models. Support will be added in the BFG to couple "native" PIK TDT and PRISM models.

Developing coupling interfaces: Human activities affect some components of the Earth system directly (e.g. the land surface) and others indirectly (e.g. the atmosphere). Earth system models including those from GENIE adopt natural coupling interfaces e.g. between the land surface and atmosphere. We will work on elaborating the coupling of human activities at these interfaces and introduce new interfaces to the modelling framework where necessary. A case study will be the coupling of land use change, which alters the land-atmosphere interface and land-ocean fluxes. We will develop our coupling framework to capture feedbacks, e.g. between land use and climate change.

Data Assimilation

Grid Technology