Fostering understanding and prediction of climate change

Modern society is faced with the need for reliable information to allow communities to adapt to the Earth's changing climate as well as possible. The IS-ENES 2 (Infrastructure for the European Network for Earth system modelling – Phase 2) project is providing the e-infrastructure that will underpin the design of adaptation strategies.

Building on the results of its predecessor project, IS-ENES2 provides and supports advanced tools for climate modelling. Since climate is a complex system that encompasses atmosphere, ocean, land and ice dynamics and their physical and biogeochemical interactions, scientists also refer to climate models as Earth system models.

IS-ENES2 project partners are conducting joint research to improve services available to the Earth system modelling community and to the climate impact community. These research efforts are largely devoted to the technology needed to run coupled climate models used for the internationally coordinated model intercomparison experiments developed under the World Climate Research Programme. The results, beyond their scientific value, back up the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and are used to develop climate change adaptation strategies. The initial project focused on global climate models, but IS-ENES2 also aims to support the access to results of experiments simulations carried out at regional scale.

Another joint research activity is dedicated to developing the software infrastructure for data archiving. Earth system modelling generates tremendously large amounts of data that have to be stored, documented and made available to support studies at a broad range of spatial and temporal scales.

IS-ENES2 ensures that Earth system models, software tools and data generated are made available to different user communities. The services provided will be of interest to researchers studying how the climate is likely to evolve. This information is important for policy makers to help develop adequate strategies to face the multi-faceted societal implications of climate change.