Modelling oceans

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21 november 2013 | How will the sea-level react on climate change? A team of the Netherlands eScience Center has been awarded a global award for their work on High-Resolution Climate Simulations and the use of advanced computer techniques in this research. They were awarded at the SC 13 Conference in Denver.

The Enlighten Your Research Global Award (EYR-G) was awarded to a team led by Prof. Henk Dijkstra from the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research from the Utrecht University and Dr. Frank Seinstra from Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC). Their work aims to execute large scale global climate simulations to investigate the effect of ocean circulation changes on (local) sea level heights.

Very detailed changes

The work of Dijkstra and his team takes place in the eSALSA project which is funded by the eScience Center. The eSALSA project aims to determine future local sea-level changes using advanced computer techniques to compute very detailed changes in water flows.

“We are able to perform computations with an ocean model which has a spatial resolution of ten kilometers. We can compute about 50 years ahead within a reasonable computational time,” Prof. Henk Dijkstra explains about his project in which distributed computing is used to predict water flow. “Findings of these simulations are often used by policymakers.”

The research that now has been awarded with the EYR-G award was conducted in cooperation with scientists from the UK, Germany and the USA. The award will allow the team to connect four of the largest supercomputer systems using advanced 10G light paths networks. Two of the available supercomputers are ranked in the top 10 of the TOP500 list.