The DOE/BER Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) indicated in its recently released Strategic Plan that there is a growing need to upgrade, coordinate, and focus data informatics and related research capabilities in support of the Division’s mission and strategy.  In response to this need, a new position at the GS13-15 level was requested; and this request was approved just a few weeks ago by the DOE Office of Science.  This will be a very important position to effectively execute our strategy to enhance connections between measurement and model data, and prepare for more sophisticated informatics capabilities to support more sophisticated earth system modeling, related field activities, analysis and diagnostics.  The successful candidate will work closely with all programs across CESD and with...

In November, Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy, announced that Titan, a new supercomputer located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named the world’s most powerful according to the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Titan, a Cray XK7, achieved a speed of 17.59 petaflops (quadrillion calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark test.

Scientists will use Titan’s computing power for a wide range of research. This includes enabling further improvements in climate science and continuing the drive toward cloud-resolving climate models; developing the next generation of materials used to manufacture U.S. goods; modeling the behavior of neutrons in a nuclear power reactor; and modeling the combustion of fuels in an...

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is the largest worldwide conference in the geophysical sciences, attracting nearly 20,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students, and policy makers. This meeting showcases current scientific theory focused on discoveries that will benefit humanity and ensure a sustainable future for our planet. This year, AGU will hold the 45th annual Fall Meeting December 3-7, 2012 in San Francisco, California.

Céline Bonfils, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a 2012 recipient of an Office of Science Early Career Research Program Award. Bonfils was selected by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research for the project “Detection and Attribution of Regional Climate Change with a Focus on the Precursors of Droughts.”

Principal Investigators who are within 10 years of receiving their doctorate and are permanent employees of a Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory or university are eligible for this award. The award provides funding over five years and is intended to provide support to outstanding researchers during the critical early career years. This year, the Office of Science chose 68 scientists for this honor.

Bonfils plans to use the funding to examine the naturally driven and externally forced components...

Katinka Bellomo, a University of Miami (UM) Meteorology and Physical Oceanography graduate student, was awarded first prize in a student poster competition by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) for the 24th Conference on Climate Change and Variability at the organization’s 92nd Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Bellomo, a graduate of the Università degli Studi di Torino - Dipartimento di Fisica Generale, is currently a 2nd year Ph.D. candidate at UM and a member of AMS. Her research is funded by a Department of Energy Office of Science grant from the Biological and Environmental Research, Regional and Global Climate Modeling (RGCM) program.

“The judges were in agreement that Katinka presented a clear, concise, and insightful study that deserved recognition,” says Michelle L’Heureux, program chair for the climate sessions at the AMS meeting.

The poster, titled, Inter-Comparison of 20th Century Trends in Cloud Cover Data Sets and Estimate of CRF Change,...

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is now accepting applications for Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) grants on topics related to the "Reduction of Tropical Cloud and Precipitation Biases in Global High Resolution Models" under the Regional and Global Climate Modeling (RGCM) and Atmospheric System Research (ASR) programs. Priority will be given to applications that examine tropical clouds and precipitation in uniform high or variable resolution global models, global cloud resolving models, and/or regional models, in the context of tropical Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) campaigns and/or data from the ARM Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) fixed sites. A summary of the announcement is available on the DOE Office of Science website. The...

The Atmosphere Model Working Group meeting will be held February 1-3 in Boulder, Colorado. The atmosphere model component of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) is the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM). The meeting agenda is now available.

The Department of Energy's Climate and Environmental Sciences Division (CESD) took part in the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California. Held December 5-9, 2011, the meeting attracted an estimated 20,000 attendees, with 12,000 posters and 6,000 oral presentations, a growth of more than 11 percent from last year's meeting. A selection of research sponsored by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research Climate and Environmental Sciences Division was presented during the meeting.

During the meeting, over 300 people stopped by the division exhibit, which included the Climate and Earth System Modeling programs. Popular materials at the exhibit included Climate Research Roadmap Workshop report, Complex Systems Science for Subsurface Fate and Transport reports, and a handout providing links to all reports for those who wanted something lighter to take home.

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A team of scientists from several national laboratories, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are collaborating to develop techniques to understand and predict how climate change will influence extreme weather events. Using considerable data sets generated by climate models, this group of researchers have applied state-of-the-art high-performance computing and data-mining resources to specific climate scenarios. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science under the Visual Data Exploration and Analysis of Ultra-Large Climate Data Project. The full article is available here.

Integrated Assessment Research Goals

To reveal climate change insights into the complex interactions of human and natural systems, to develop integrated models and tools to underpin future national and regional decision-making on options for mitigation and adaptation.

In late October, U.S. Department of Energy's Climate and Earth System Modeling programs participated in the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Open Science conference in Denver as part of the exhibit organized by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research's Climate and Environmental Science Division. As a platinum sponsor for the conference focused on climate research in service to society, DOE's display showcased the Climate and Environmental Science Division programs, including Earth System Modeling, Regional and Global Climate Modeling, and Integrated Assessment of Global Climate Change.

In four days over 100 visitors, from the interested passerby to the in-depth information gatherer, from many countries including, Japan, Malaysia, Ethiopia, Australia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Jamaica, South Korea, Turkey, and the Netherlands, stopped by the exhibit. Featured in the booth were climate modeling animations,...

The DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship Program (DOE SCGF) is now accepting applications for 2012. The SCGF is a three-year award, providing partial tuition support, an annual stipend for living expenses, and a research allowance for full-time graduate study and thesis/dissertation research at U.S. academic institutions. Applicants must be U.S. citizens, a first- or second-year graduate student, or an undergraduate senior at the time of application. Applicants must be pursuing or plan to pursue advanced degrees in areas relevant to the Office of Science research, e.g., physics, materials sciences, chemistry, biology, applied mathematics, computer and computational sciences, environmental sciences, and some areas of engineering.

A complete description and a link to the online application can be found on the program website. Applications are due Tuesday, January 3, 2012. If you...

University awards were recently provided to applicants for the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing, or SciDAC, program solicitation, from BER's climate modeling programs to support collaborative research that will enhance spatial resolution, physical process representation, validation, and uncertainty quantification of climate models underpinned by high-performance petascale computing. The goal is to actualize and further foster direct collaboration between computational scientists and climate model developers to facilitate advances in climate modeling simulations.

The following projects recently were awarded SciDAC program funding:

Physics and Dynamics Coupling Across Scales in the Next-Generation CESM: Meeting the Challenge of High Resolution
Principal Investigator: Julio T. Bacmeister, National Center for Atmospheric Research

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