May 14, 2024
From March 12-14, a group of climate modelers and developers gathered at CSIRO in Aspendale, Victoria for the CMIP7 ACCESS evaluation hackathon to evaluate Australia’s climate model ACCESS and provide scientific input for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 7 (CMIP7).
As a globally-coordinated shared resource, CMIP is widely used for research and in producing information for decision-makers, including through national and state climate projections. The 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth assessment report featured climate models from CMIP6, while the upcoming IPCC seventh assessment report (AR7) will feature new state-of-the-art CMIP7 models. For CMIP6, Australia submitted two (ACCESS-CM2 and ACCESS ESM1.5) primary model configurations, developed by CSIRO.
This hackathon was co-hosted by the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator-National Research Infrastructure (ACCESS-NRI), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, CSIRO and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)
There were 40 participants in person and 15 online, including researchers and software developers from the hosting organisations, the Climate Systems Hub, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Centre for Climate Research Singapore and a range of Australian universities.
The program involved a mix of presentations, discussions, and training sessions, alongside domain-specific breakout group discussions and hacking sessions.
CMIP7 Evaluation Hackathon 2024 Report
The aims of this hackathon were:
- Gather scientific input for ACCESS model evaluation at the model development stage
- Introduce the community to evaluation tools ESMValTool and ILAMB
- Agree upon desired metrics needed for evaluation to be incorporated into workflow “recipes” within these evaluation tools
- Build a community around the ACCESS model
- Discuss the type of simulations necessary and sufficient for evaluation of the model
The training and hackathon sessions focused on using ESMValTool – a community-driven workflow tool for evaluating Earth system models in CMIP.
The ACCESS-NRI Model Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) Team made ESMValTool available on the Gadi supercomputer at NCI, alongside relevant observational datasets ready to be used by the tool. The Gadi implementation specifically for the Australian ACCESS modelling community is called ESMValTool-workflow. Hackathon participants were introduced to ESMValTool-workflow and were challenged to start running recipes to gain familiarity with the tool. In addition, each domain-specific breakout group was asked to come up with a list of metrics that they use/need to evaluate their model, as well as a list of general issues/needs they would like ACCESS-NRI to address in relation to ACCESS model evaluation.
For more details about topics covered during the hackathon, you can read through the CMIP7 Evaluation Hackathon 2024 Report and through the following notes taken by attendees (in Google Doc form):
- General hackathon notes (thanks to Sramana, Dhruv, and Aditya for these fantastic notes!)
- Domain-specific breakout group notes (these are condensed summaries of the discussions had in each breakout group, based on the notes taken by breakout group participants)
Other related documents, including the agenda and technical guides, can be found in the ACCESS-NRI CMIP7 Hackathon GitHub repository.
Read a report of the event by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes: https://climateextremes.org.au/the-next-generation-of-climate-scientists-collaborate-on-the-australias-contribution-to-the-ipcc-reports/
Thanks and acknowledgements
The ACCESS-NRI team would like to thank the organisers of the Hackathon for their immense efforts in putting together and running this event, and for accommodating both in-person and online participants.
We also recognise the funders of this event, CLEX – The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and ACCESS-NRI, and CSIRO Aspendale for hosting the in-person portion of the event.
ACCESS-NRI modelling relies on computational and data resources from high-performance supercomputers operated by Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) located at The Australian National University.
ACCESS-NRI and NCI are enabled by the Australian Government, Department of Education through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
Images credits:
Paige Martin, ACCESS-NRI
Citation: Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator – National Research Infrastructure (ACCESS-NRI). 2024 CMIP7 Hackathon Report