Why Choose Earth System Solutions?
Excellent Earth System Understanding
In the era of climate change, we are confronted by many compelling issues, which make decision making and operation of a huge variety of companies a challenge. For instance, in this century, the temperatures on our planet will rise further not only leading to temperature extremes and droughts but also to a modification of the water cycle, which in turn will lead to significant changes of precipitation pattern.
Our team has more than 15 years of experience in the understanding and the simulation of the Earth system with a huge variety of refinements, e.g., with respect to the shape of the terrain and water surfaces, the details of the land cover, the complexity of aerosol properties and chemical cycles as well as the representation of vegetation properties and dynamic growth. We are capable to address your needs with respect to Earth system simulations using the most sophisticated and advanced models yielding very reliable and trustful results.
Set up and Operation of one of the Most Advanced Weather Forecast and Climate Models
Our team operates a model suite with unique properties, which can be taylored to a huge variety of user needs. The model system is called WRF-NOAHMP with some additional components called GECROS, HYDRO, or LAKE where each of these acronyms are standing for a model component. These components can be explained as follows:
1) WRF: The weather research and forecasting model. This part contains the simulation of the atmospheric properties and its dynamics from the surface to the stratosphere. Spatial and vertical resolutions can be adapted to the user needs.
2) CHEM: An additional component, which can be coupled to WRF, simulating aerosol particle properties, pollution, and chemical cycles in the real atmospheric environment provided by WRF. For instance, this components permits the simulation of fine particle matter and nitrogen oxides for the study of pollution in urban areas.
3) NOAHMP: This components stands for the land surface model. It considers the heat and water transport in the soil, the properties of the vegetation, and its exchange with the atmosphere, e.g., by the simulation of evapotranspiration. Different land cover can be represented in great detail such as urban, desert, and agricultural types. Furthermore, any modification of the terrain can be considered such as the erection of artificial mountains of arbitrary shape.
4) GECROS: This is a new component in the model system permitting the representation of vegetation dynamics, particular with respect to crops such as wheat and maize.
5) HYDRO: This is an external model system component, which can be coupled to the rest of this Earth system model, in order to improve the representation and simulation of water transport in the ground water, in the soil, and at the land surface such as run off and streamflow.
6) LAKE: The artificial flooding of depressions and other areas even by the modification of the terrain can be simulated by the LAKE component. The LAKE model incorporates artificial lakes and calculates the modification of land-atmosphere exchange processes.
High-Performance Supercomputing and Big Data
Our modeling infrastructure permits to run very challenging problems with strong computational demands. It is possible to perform simulations on a supercomputer in Stuttgart, which is one of the largest and fastest computers in Europe.
In order to optimize the model output, the model configuration can be adapted to your needs with respect to:
1) Model resolution: Adaptation of the grid increment to resolve more or less physical features of the Earth system depending on your application.
2) Forecast range and time resolution: A large range of forecast times can be covered from very high-resolution nowcasting (a few hours), to weeks, to seasons, to decades, allowing seamless simulations from the weather forecast to the seasonal to climate scales up to the end of this century.
3) Size of model output: The size, the spatial and temporal resolution, the number of choise of variables as well as the domain can be adapted to your application.
4) Data constraints: The data can be stored on large storage devices, post-processed and even a variety of further derived variables can be determined.
Data Analyses and Visualizations
We have in-depth expertise in the post-processing and visualization of the data depending on the applications. This includes:
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Plots of time series with uncertainty estimates.
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Various 2-dimensional plots in the vertical or the horizontal over the terrain, horizontal slices, etc.
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Movies of the 2- to 3-dimensional evolution of Earth system variables, which is likely the most impressive but also challenging part.
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Transformation of 3-dimensional movies in stereographic projections so that real 3-dimensional movies can be produced on suitable TV screens or projectors.
Please ask us for further details.
Statistical Analyses and Verification of the Data Sets
Last but not least we offer a huge variety of statistical work packages to evaluate the model output with respect to
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model uncertainty if ensemble runs are performed,
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statistical analyses such as bias and rms errors,
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comparisons with observations for model verification using a variables of deterministic and ensemble-based skill scores.
These tools will enable you to fully understand your model output and to characterize model errors and uncertainty.