Schmidt Sciences – VESRI Climate Modeling Challenge: Accelerating Development Cycles for Coupled Climate Models, Phase I – Expressions of Intent

The Virtual Earth Systems Research Institute (VESRI) supports a portfolio of multi-year projects focused on improving the realism and credibility of climate models through enhanced mathematical methods and algorithms. Through VESRI, we coordinate hundreds of climate and data scientists across 9 projects, 17 countries, and 65 research institutions to tackle difficult scientific and computational problems in climate modeling. VESRI advances this mission through three priorities:

1. Improving representation of essential processes across scales in Earth System Models through enhanced mathematical methods and algorithms
2. Incorporating findings, processes, and outputs into multiple regional and global models to demonstrate measurable reduction in systematic bias
3. Promoting cross-disciplinary research, team science, sustainable software practices, and open data as common practice

At present, climate model development cycles remain slow and resource-intensive: model improvements often require substantial time, engineering effort, and computational resources to implement, integrate, and recalibrate within Earth System Models (ESMs). This Climate Modeling Challenge is a new funding initiative aiming to enhance and accelerate coupled model development cycles, with a focus on efficient and reproducible coupled model calibration, thereby advancing VESRI’s core mission to make climate projections more realistic and useful for decision-making. Given the rapid emergence of machine learning (ML) in climate modeling applications, this funding initiative is open to a range of modeling approaches, including process-based, ML-based, and other models.

The Challenge will be launched in a phased approach:

• Phase I: Coupled Climate Model Calibration Workflow and Stability – The focus of Phase I is to implement a workflow for systematic reproducible calibration in a coupled climate model (defined here as at minimum a three-dimensional atmosphere-ocean global climate model; see Glossary for details). During this phase teams will be asked to:

1. Demonstrate bias reduction through a scientifically relevant simulation (see Glossary for details)
2. Demonstrate stability through a pre-industrial control (piC) simulation over a minimum of 150 years (see Glossary for details)

• Phase II: Application of Calibration Workflow to ESMs…

This call solicits Expressions of Intent (EOIs) for Phase I of the Modeling Challenge.

Funding: up to USD 2M per team over 24 months.

EOI structure: submissions should provide a maximum 3-page proposal with the following information:  Project Narrative;  Research Plan;  Adoption and Reproducibility Plan;  Project Team and Partnerships and, Preliminary Budget

https://airtable.com/appDCapaPF9M0iLQO/pagRxgvY9pCkOeaxx/form

https://www.schmidtsciences.org/vesri/