Trends in Computing for Climate Research

Abstract:

The grand challenges of climate science will stress our informatics infrastructure severely in the next decade. Our drive for ever greater simulation resolution/complexity/length/repetition, coupled with new remote and in-situ sensing platforms present us with problems in computation, data handling, and information management, to name but three. These problems are compounded by the background trends: Moore's Law is no longer doing us any favours: computing is getting harder to exploit as we have to bite the parallelism bullet, and Kryder's Law (if it ever existed) isn't going to help us store the data volumes we can see ahead. The variety of data, the rate it arrives, and the complexity of the tools we need and use, all strain our ability to cope. The solutions, as ever, will revolve around more and better software, but "more" and "better" will require some attention.

In this talk we discuss how these issues have played out in the context of CMIP5, and might be expected to play out in CMIP6 and successors. Although the CMIPs will provide the thread, we will digress into modelling per se, regional climate modelling (CORDEX), observations from space (Obs4MIPs and friends), climate services (as they might play out in Europe), and the dependency of progress on how we manage people in our institutions. It will be seen that most of the issues we discuss apply to the wider environmental sciences, if not science in general. They all have implications for the need for both sustained infrastructure and ongoing research into environmental informatics.