Full Earth System Simulation Is A New Tool To Understand Climate Change

Created by : News Desk View profile

Schematic showing the main components of the Earth system in ICON and the exchange of energy, water, and carbon among them. Table 2 presents the degrees of freedom assigned to each component. Credit: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (2025).

Association for Computing Machinery

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan

Editors' notes

Nov. 22, 2025

The Association for Computing Machinery has presented a 26-member team with the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling in recognition of their project "Computing the Full Earth System at 1 km Resolution."

The award honors innovative contributions to parallel computing toward solving the global climate crisis.

Climate change is responsible for more extreme hurricanes, more destructive wildfires, severe droughts, and increased human disease, among other harmful outcomes. Experts warn that if carbon emissions are not significantly reduced within a few decades, the damage to Earth's ecosystem will be irreversible.

Among the most effective tools scientists have developed to understand climate change are digital simulations of Earth. These simulations are produced by developing specific algorithms to run on the world's most powerful supercomputers. But simulating how human activity influences the climate has been an extraordinarily difficult challenge.

A mind-boggling number of variables need to be taken into consideration -- such as the cycles of water, energy, and carbon, how those factors relate to each other, and how diverse physical, biological, and chemical processes interact over space and time. For these reasons, previous state-of-the-art simulations have not been able to achieve what is referred to as a "Full Earth System" simulation.

(more)