First-Ever Full Earth System Simulation Provides New Tool to Understand Climate Change

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-full-earth-simulation-tool-climate.html

Climate change is responsible for more extreme hurricanes, more destructive wildfires, severe droughts, and increased human disease, among other harmful outcomes. Experts warn that if carbon emissions are not significantly reduced within a few decades, the damage to Earth's ecosystem will be irreversible.

Among the most effective tools scientists have developed to understand climate change are digital simulations of Earth. These simulations are produced by developing specific algorithms to run on the world's most powerful supercomputers. But simulating how human activity influences the climate has been an extraordinarily difficult challenge.

A mind-boggling number of variables need to be taken into consideration-such as the cycles of water, energy, and carbon, how those factors relate to each other, and how diverse physical, biological, and chemical processes interact over space and time. For these reasons, previous state-of-the-art simulations have not been able to achieve what is referred to as a "Full Earth System" simulation.

The Gordon Bell Climate Prize-winning team reached a landmark this year by being the first team ever to develop a Full Earth Simulation at 1 km (extremely high) Resolution. In their introduction, they explain, "We present the first-ever global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km grid spacing, achieving highest time compression with an unseen number of degrees of freedom.

"Our model captures the flow of energy, water, and carbon through key components of the Earth system: atmosphere, ocean, and land. To achieve this landmark simulation, the team harnessed the power of 8192 GPUs on Alps and 4096 GPUs on JUPITER, two of the world's largest GH200 superchip installations."

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