The ACCESS-NRI team has added a “Menu” into the Earth System Model (EM1.5) that allows paleoclimate researchers to customise the model output by choosing presets of the variables they want to simulate, as well as the data they want to keep.
The Earth System Model 1.5 (ESM1.5) is used by the paleoclimate community to understand the climate of the Earth from thousands to millions of years ago. The ACCESS-NRI team have now included more features in the new release of ESM1.5, making their work easier, faster and more precise. 
Paleoclimates provide a unique perspective on climate change by allowing researchers to understand the feedbacks involved in climate change processes as well as testing climate models. This can ultimately help improve current climate models.
The paleoclimate community runs the model for thousands of years, producing incredible amounts of data. It can take approximately 2 months to run 1000 model years on supercomputers like Gadi at NCI.
“Each of the components of the ESM1.5 model has hundreds of different variables, such as temperature, rainfall, etc. When you run the model, you need to choose which variables you want to save. This process can be quite slow and the way you control it can be very cryptic and difficult to understand. These presets allow the researcher to choose more easily which data they want to keep or discard, accelerating the process of setting up an experiment,” says ACCESS-NRI’s Spencer Wong, co-developer of this feature.
Dr David Hutchinson, a paleoclimate researcher from the UNSW Sydney uses the ESM1.5 model to simulate the Miocene climate optimum (15 million years ago). The Miocene is interesting to study because it was quite warm, with high CO2 and low ice coverage, which makes it a good analogue for future climate change.
Dr Hutchinson says “We are very excited about this update of the model, as it will make our outputs more compact, easier to spin to an equilibrium and we don’t have to rebuild the model each time we run a new simulation, which is very time consuming. These new menus have a handy quick switch to choose between different presets, as sometimes you want to save lots of variables and sometimes less, depending on the question.”
“This feature and the new orbital parameters dial have been on the wish-list of the paleoclimate community for a long time. Making the model easier to use and enabling us to make the changes ourselves is incredibly useful as we can spend more time solving the questions instead of on solving the technical details,” says Dr Hutchinson.