ESCAPE-2 will impact European excellence for efficiently employing exascale high-performance computing in support of one of the largest societal impact areas, namely high-resolution weather and climate forecasting.
A new risk is the changing characteristics (frequency, location, severity) of weather and climate related hazards since natural climate variability is now exacerbated by long-term, human-induced climate change. The socio-economic impact of disasters given climate change is likely to be escalating because of their increasing frequency and severity and the growing vulnerability of human societies. Investment in forecasting systems that provide reliable and timely warning is therefore critical. The above economic assessments conclude that these investments pay for themselves many times over. Future improvements in predictive skill for both weather and climate will originate from enhanced spatial resolution, the better representation of more complex physical and chemical processes, from the coupling between atmosphere, land surface and oceans, cryosphere and biosphere, and from a better characterization of forecast uncertainty through ensembles. All of these require fundamentally different approaches to computing and data management given constraints on power and storage consumption that will represent impediments to progress from present-day petascale to exascale computing. The development of new paradigms is outside the realm of individual operational services and requires internationally coordinated research and funding, a need that is addressed by ESCAPE-2's research focus and constellation of domain representative partners. ESCAPE-2 will directly benefit the consortia representing the countries shown in the figure to the right. ESCAPE-2 will further produce direct impact on both Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS), as they rely - among others - on the world-leading European modelling systems IFS, ICON and NEMO.
