About Us
Information about the Model & Data group
Our mission
While the development and operation of numerical climate models is becoming more complex, the model development is distributed among an increasing number of institutes. It is not just the pure number of program code-lines and the challenges for software engineers that are growing by the increasing complexity of models, model environments and computer architecture, but also the number of computed results and aspects of analysis.
Development and operation of Earth System models and analysis of model results require cooperation in a geographically distributed working environment. The aim should be to minimize the expenditure of human labour on infrastructure development and infrastructure service in a scientific environment and to provide standardized workflows on the Earth System modelling and postprocessing of the results to the scientists.
M&D examine typical workflows of the Earth System modelling process and link them to an integrating infrastructure.
The considered workflows are
- Services provided by M&D and workflow of the Integrated Model and Data Infrastructure (IMDI).
- Integration of new model components, like e.g. atmospheric chemistry, land surface processes and inland-ice, into a coupled numerical model system (Earth System model),
- Porting of Earth System models to different computer architectures,
- Operating complex Earth System models for cost-effective computations via chain experiments,
- Postprocessing, analysis and visualisation of the computation results, size of data sets amounting to several Terrabytes,
- Documentation, application-oriented long-term data storage and validation of the computation results for own and external projects,
- International distribution of Earth System research data and their integration into common information systems.
The workflows are processed exemplarily by M&D and abstracted. From this knowledge tool sets are developed, which will facilitate the day-to-day work of scientists. The development of tool sets was highly supported by the cooperative work in the EU-project PRISM. In the framework of this project several Earth System models from different institutes equipped with a variety of computer architectures were made available for testing purposes.
The aim of the activities of M&D is to develop and promote best practice methods to handle Earth System models and their results. This development is done in close cooperation with the DKRZ to guarantee an effective usage of the infrastructure for Earth System modelling at the DKRZ. The cooperation in the international PRISM Support Initiative (PSI) gives the opportunity to account for computer systems and models of the European partners and thereby ensure portability and flexibility.
First results of this work are the Integrating Model and Data Infrastructure (IMDI) and the semantically oriented data management implemented by the CERA data model and realized by the ICSU World Data Center for Climate (WDCC).
Details
- Organisation Chart of M&D
