Although current Earth system models (ESMs) project a consistent pattern of future global warming, there are important regional differences that increase the uncertainty at the local scale, which poses a risk for climate adaptation.
Regional uncertainty can partly be attributed to the model's inability to resolve the ocean mesoscale, which is critical for a wide range of atmospheric and oceanic processes at the global and regional scales.
The S-EERIE1 project is designed to tackle the modelling activities of the first phase of the Horizon Europe EERIE project, which aims at building and exploiting a new generation of ESMs that resolve the ocean mesoscale and its interactions with the global climate.
EERIE will substantially improve our ability to represent faithfully the centennial-scale evolution of the global climate, especially its variability, extremes and how it may approach tipping points.
Such models would therefore allow novel insight into critical processes at the mesoscale, along with their changes in a warming world.
S-EERIE1 will produce a spin-up to allow model equilibration, a control simulation to characterize the model’s internal variability, and a first historical simulation to explore its increased realism compared to other models and observations.
All these simulations will be generated with IFSc48r3 and NEMO4.2, both with a grid spacing of ~10 km. S-EERIE1 will therefore help us understand the role of the ocean mesoscale in regional and global climate, support major international scientific assessments, such as the IPCC through CMIP, increase confidence in estimates of climate internal variability and change in the recent past, and, ultimately, contribute to the success of the Horizon Europe EERIE project.