WarmWorld at Three Years: Advancing km-Scale Earth System Modelling

March 9, 2025

Three years into its first phase, WarmWorld has established itself at the forefront of kilometre-scale Earth system modelling, both within the German high-resolution landscape and internationally. The project has met — or is on track to meet — its core performance targets, while delivering substantial scientific, technical, and community-building advances.

Among the key achievements are the open-source release of ICON as a fully coupled Earth system model, record-breaking award-winning simulation throughput at unprecedented resolution, and the development of scalable workflows that are beginning to serve as community standards. These advances position WarmWorld as a central contributor to Europe’s emerging exascale and digital twin ecosystem for climate science.

Module Highlights

Progress has been driven by coordinated developments across the project’s four modules:

Better has advanced kilometre-scale modelling through systematic application and evaluation of high-resolution configurations. This has enabled new scientific insights — including improved understanding of climate feedbacks — while steadily reducing long-standing model biases.

Faster has focused on performance and scalability, delivering an exascale-ready modelling system. ICON has been successfully ported and optimised across major European supercomputing platforms, achieving sustained high throughput at kilometre-scale resolution.

Easier has transformed workflows and data handling, establishing robust, modular, and increasingly standardised infrastructures for simulation control, output, and analysis. These developments support scalable, federated, and cloud-compatible workflows.

Smarter has enhanced computational efficiency through algorithmic and data-centric innovation, improving analysis capabilities and enabling more effective use of high-resolution simulations.

Together, these efforts have laid the scientific and technical foundations for the Phase 2 of WarmWorld.

Building a Community and Ecosystem

Beyond technical achievements, WarmWorld has played a key role in shaping an international community around km-scale modelling. It has contributed to new initiatives, coordinated global hackathons, and strengthened links between modelling, observations, and emerging AI-driven approaches.

Close alignment with projects such as nextGEMS, EERIE, and Destination Earth has amplified impact and ensured interoperability within a broader European strategy for high-resolution climate modelling.

Challenges and the Road Ahead

Despite this progress, important challenges remain. Access to stable, high-performance computing resources continues to be a limiting factor, and the scaling and operationalisation of data infrastructure require further development.

At the same time, these challenges highlight key opportunities: to fully exploit exascale computing, to integrate AI-driven analysis workflows, and to broaden community engagement in evaluating and applying these new modelling capabilities.

With the release of the first-phase configuration planned for the end of 2026, WarmWorld is now focused on consolidating its achievements and preparing the transition to its second phase.