Meanwhile, experts say that funding cuts could mean modeling abilities migrate overseas, some science may never be realized, and expertise could be lost.
With that toss-off of talent, said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, countries like China may catch up to the US “It would have been very hard for them to have a more respected scientific organization or scientific system than the US did,” Dessler said. “Our research universities are really the envy of the world, and our government labs are the envy of the world.”
But they won’t be, he said, if the country loses the expertise of those who work in them.
E3SM scientists want to understand how Earth changes over time and how much conditions vary within long-term projections—like, say, how average temperature may creep up over time, but extremely low temperatures blast Colorado nevertheless. Eventually, these scientists hope to incorporate enough chemistry, physics, and biology to create a “digital twin” of the planet—modeling Earth in a way true to its real form.
That’s a lofty goal, especially since reaching even the current, less twin-like stage took scientists more than 10 years of software development and tweaking. “The models are very big in terms of how much code there is,” said Lawrence, the earth system scientist at NCAR. (Through a spokesperson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose scientists lead the model’s development, declined to comment for this story. “We aren’t able to offer interviews about E3SM at this time,” lab spokesperson Jeremy Thomas wrote in an email; he did not respond to an emailed question about why.)
Lawrence, though, knows this, as head of a similar project, called the Community Earth System Model, an early version of which served as a basis for E3SM.