Collaborative Research: Frameworks: A community platform for accelerating observationally-constrained regional oceanographic modeling

Oceans are a critical element of the climate system and global carbon budget. Oceans also support food security, global trade, and energy production. A fusion of observations and results from high-fidelity models of the ocean's state are needed to understand and manage these uses and their impacts.

Presently, this capability is available to only a small expert community. This project augments the capabilities of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to enable a larger and more multidisciplinary community of users to address important questions about Earth's oceans. New observational efforts, such as the Ocean Vital Signs Network (OVSN), can leverage the tools generated by this project to design better observing systems, maximize information gained from observations, and ultimately provide the decision support needed to meet stakeholder needs.

The project aims to greatly expand community access to fit-for-purpose ocean simulations and state estimates, thereby enabling applications by a more diverse community. The infrastructure will explicitly support robust usability in the context of end-to-end workflows. The project will produce clear documentation, include explicit mechanisms for disseminating the tools, and feature conscientious efforts to educate and train a diverse community of users, including from beyond the traditional research community.

Internships will support participation of historically under-represented groups and a series of workshops will build capacity in traditionally underserved communities.

This project will deliver software infrastructure facilitating rapid configuration, deployment, and analysis of the Modular Ocean Model version 6 (MOM6) within the CESM. A common framework will support high-resolution regional domains forced laterally by datasets or embedded online within a global model for fully-coupled or ocean-only simulations. These configurations will support flexible ocean biogeochemistry simulations using the Marine Biogeochemistry Library (MARBL) and the application of data assimilation using the Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART).

Development will be tested and motivated by the technical requirements of a novel use case: designing and supporting interpretation of an intensive, community-oriented observational array, the OVSN, which seeks to dramatically improve capacity to measure and understand the function and future evolution of the ocean's physical, chemical and biological dynamics, with a focus on carbon cycling. This project will reduce technical bottlenecks within all stages of modeling workflows.

The ultimate objective is to accelerate advances in regional ocean state estimation and facilitate applications by a diverse community.

This award by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Division of Research, Innovation, Synergies, and Education (RISE) and the Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE) within the NSF Directorate for Geosciences, and funds for development of a National Discovery Cloud (NDC) for Climate.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.