PRISM and ENES: a European approach to Earth system modelling

✍ Scribed by Sophie Valcke; Eric Guilyardi; Claes Larsson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 188 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1532-0626
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.915

✦ Synopsis

Europe's widely distributed climate modelling expertise, now organized in the European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES), is both a strength and a challenge. Recognizing this, the European Union's Program for Integrated Earth System Modelling (PRISM) infrastructure project aims at designing a flexible and friendly user environment to assemble, run and post-process Earth System models. PRISM was started in December 2001 with a duration of three years. This paper presents the major stages of PRISM, including:

(1) the definition and promotion of scientific and technical standards to increase component modularity;

(2) the development of an end-to-end software environment (graphical user interface, coupling and I/O system, diagnostics, visualization) to launch, monitor and analyse complex Earth system models built around state-of-art community component models (atmosphere, ocean, atmospheric chemistry, ocean bio-chemistry, sea-ice, land-surface); and (3) testing and quality standards to ensure high-performance computing performance on a variety of platforms.

PRISM is emerging as a core strategic software infrastructure for building the European research area in Earth system sciences.