Connecting nodes, advancing models: the 2025 WCRP Global Hackathon

WarmWorld is excited to co-sponsor the Hamburg node of the WCRP Global km-Scale Hackathon 2025, a pivotal event uniting climate scientists worldwide to advance high-resolution Earth system modeling. This global hackathon, organized under the WCRP Digital Earths Lighthouse Activity, takes place this week, May 12-16, 2025, across 10 regional nodes, including Hamburg.

WWith its objective of developing the ICON model for exascale applications, WarmWorld joins its main partner-projects, nextGEMS, Destination Earth and EERIE, in organizing the Hamburg node, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. This collaboration underscores WarmWorld’s commitment to enhancing kilometer-scale climate modeling through the ICON-based storm-and-eddy-resolving Earth-system model.

This Global Hackathon continues the tradition of hackathons, but with its global expansion, it provides participants with access not only to the ICON and IFS-FESOM high-resolution climate data from km-scale simulations, but to outputs from 10 different models, all formatted similarly to ensure easy handling and exploring. Jupyter Notebooks are available to guide data handling, enabling participants to develop their own analyses and visualizations.

A cornerstone of the WCRP Global km-Scale Hackathon 2025 is its science team structure — topic-based working groups that connect researchers across all global nodes. These teams provide a collaborative framework for tackling frontier challenges in Earth system science, from the behavior of tropical rainbelts to urban climate dynamics:

• Energetics of tropical rainbelts: Investigating convection representation across tropical oceans using an energetic-moisture framework.
• Precipitation over ice sheets: Assessing model simulations of precipitation and temperature over Greenland and Antarctica to inform ice-sheet modeling.
• Triggering of deep convection: Exploring the initiation mechanisms of convective storms within tropical rainbelts.
• Urban climate modeling: Examining the representation of urban areas in km-scale models and their impact on local climates.
• Air-sea interaction in the tropics: Analyzing the coupling between atmospheric and oceanic processes in tropical regions.

Follow us as we explore :)