Missions

Climate change raises several challenges for the ENES scientific community:

• To improve our understanding and prediction of future climate changes requires the analysis of the full complexity of the Earth System, i.e. the physical, biological and chemical dimensions coupled together, and the development of comprehensive Earth System Models capable of simulating natural climate variability and human induced climate changes;
• To improve our understanding and prediction of climate change impacts in all socio-economic dimensions requires better accounts of climate change on regional scales and enhanced interactions with the climate change impact community. This will be particularly required to prepare for adaptation to climate change.

In order to improve European competitiveness and expertise, there is also a need to:

• Better integrate countries that are new to the subject and that want to be involved in the study of climate change. Indeed, with the increasing threat of climate change, more countries want to develop their own expertise on climate change prediction to prepare for adaptation;
• Perform the most up-to-date and accurate climate simulations. This requires sophisticated models, world-class, high-performance computers, and state-of-the-art software infrastructures to make efficient use of the models and the hardware.

ENES main mission is to accelerate progress in climate system modelling in Europe. Its primary motivation is to provide a venue for addressing the strategic issues associated with developing, running, analysing, and archiving simulations of the Earth’s climate system on high performance computing systems.

More specifically, ENES is intended to:

• Help in the development and evaluation of state-of-the-art Earth’s climate system models,
• Facilitate international model intercomparisons to assess and improve these models,
• Encourage sharing of software
• Enable the dissemination of model results, especially within internationally coordinated experiments
• Promote the use and development of high-performance computing facilities suitable for running long multi-model ensemble integrations of high-resolution and/or high-complexity models, and providing an environment for analysing, evaluating and archiving those simulations.
• Develop and grow the community of scientists and engineers necessary to support model development and infrastructure