Help maintain the information up-to-date by sending feedback and corrections to the WG3b coordinator !  

Content

• Coordination
• About WG3b
• NWP in Europe
• WG3b activities
  • AG TERRA, TERRA developments
  • vegetation phenology
  • mire parameterization
  • urban parameterization 
  • snow model, snow analysis
• Support activities
  • model calibration, PP CALMO, PP CALMO-MAX
  • TERRA offline
  • EXTPAR
  • SRNWP data pool
• Related activities

 

Coordination

Many ICON activities take place outside of the scope of the COSMO Consortium.
One main duty of the coordinator is to keep an overview of all soil and surface activities in the ICON community, and to collect the information on this page.

You will find a list of ICON all staff meetings here and a list of ICON Working Group meetings here (GitLab at DKRZ, authentication required).
Please, keep these lists up-to-date (send an e-mail to the WG3b coordinator if you are not able to edit the page yourself) !

 

About WG3b

This working group focuses on soil and surface aspects, taking care of all associated COSMO/ICON parameterization schemes.
It was formed in September 2011, following the split of the "original WG3 into the two new "Upper Air" and "Soil and Surface" working groups.
Currently the working group coordinator is Jean-Marie Bettems working at MeteoSwiss.  

Typically, two yearly meetings are organized: in spring the ICCARUS meeting (previously COSMO User Seminar), and during the COSMO General Meeting.
The papers presented during these meetings are available on-line (COSMO GM 2011, COSMO US 2012, COSMO GM 2012, COSMO US 2013, COSMO GM 2013,
COSMO US 2014, COSMO GM 2104, COSMO US 2015, COSMO GM 2015, COSMO US 2016, COSMO GM 2016, COSMO GM 2017, ICCARUS 2018, COSMO GM 2018,
ICCARUS 2019, COSMO GM 2019, COSMO GM 2020 [plenum, parallel, summary], ICCARUS 2021, COSMO GM 2021 [plenum, parallel], 
ICCARUS 2022 [links in relevant sections], COSMO GM 2022, ICCARUS 2023).

All tasks defined under the umbrella of this working group are documented either on this page or in the work plan pages (not maintained anymore but still some relevant information).
Most activities are driven by the requirements specified in the COSMO Science Plan, or by the WG3 guidance document.

The documentation of the soil model, TERRA, is available in the chapter 11 of the part II of the model documentation.
The documentation of the lake model and of the sea-ice model are available in the chapters 12 and 13 of the part II of the model documentation.
The documentation of the external parameters is found in the associated software section.

 

NWP in Europe

Different surface modelling sytems are currently used for NWP production in Europe:
CHTESSEL (ECMWF), JULES (MetOffice), SURFEX (ALADIN/HIRLAM/LACE, ACCORD planning), and TERRA (COSMO).
The coordination between the European consortia is done by the SRNWP expert team on surface processes.
Most recent information about latest developments may be found in the recent EWGLAM meetings (2020, 2021 — look in particular at the "Plenary Session on Surface Aspects", 2022).

There is an active international lake modelling community, with a particular focus on improving the FLake lake model and on extending the data sets required to run such models.

 

WG3b activities

Priority tasks and priority projects are marked in red.

A scientific overview of the main development topics is available in the papers presented at the EWGLAM meetings.
This one is about the soil and surface aspects (WG3b) and this one about the upper air physics (WG3a).

AG TERRA at DWD

• AG TERRA @ DWD - Status of activities
  • 02.2017 meeting, 11.2017 meeting, 12.2018 meeting, 02.2019 meeting, 11.2019 meeting (soil hydraulic properties)

TERRA developments (for peer-reviewed papers describing TERRA, you can use the references  1 and 2).

• [Finished] MSc to compare COSMO/TERRA with COSMO/CLM for NWP applications, Verena Bessenbacher in the group of Prof. S. Seniviratne @ETHZ, 01.12.2017 - 31.05.2018
  • Paper in ‚Environmental Research Letters‘ by E. Davin et al. makes the point that COSMO/CLM outperforms COSMO/TERRA and most other RCMs for surface fluxes and temperature
    (without any expert tuning but at much coarser resolutions). Are these findings still valid in NWP mode?
  • Plan, thesis, seminar
  • Main findings: the more vegetation the largest the error in TERRA, CLM beats TERRA for surface fluxes but verification of temperature shows mixed signal
• [Finished] COSMO PT TERRA nova, document impact of changes in TERRA after unification with ICON code, Yiftach Ziv @IMS, 09.2016 - 02.2019
  • PT plan, PT extension 1, PT extension 2, model configurations, final report
  • Main findings: no striking differences between all tested TERRA v5.05 configurations.
• [Finished] PhD at ETHZ to improve COSMO/TERRA hydrology, Daniel Regenass @ETHZ, 2018 - 2020
  • Based on TERRA revised hydrology introduced by Linda Schlemmer.
  • Overview, EGU 2020, paper 1 (validation framework), paper 2 (Richards equation)
• The TERRA module used in COSMO v6.0, the last supported COSMO release, has been unified with the TERRA module used in the ICON model.
  • In addition, the multi-layers snow model (PT SAINT), the urban model (PT AEVUS 2) and an improved soil hydrology (PhD Regenass) are available as options.
  • The skin layer temperature (vegetation effects, as in Viterbo and Beljaars 1995) is available and brings a substantial improvement to near surface parameters (see here, in particular slides 19ff).
  • But major differences in the treatment of the surface between the COSMO and the ICON models exist (e.g. tiles in ICON, external parameters treatment, model tuning). 
  • The DWD recommends a conservative configuration with many recent TERRA developments switched off (see here).
  • An innovative set of namelist switches is proposed here, but should be thoroughly tested before using them for production (and the model newly calibrated) .
    • Positive experience has been made at MeteoSwiss with this new settings, which is now used for production in the COSMO-1E/-2E configurations (see here, in particuler slide 12).
• About the TERRA module used in ICON 
  • The skin layer temperature implemented in COSMO v6.0 is also available in TERRA/ICON (and used in production at DWD).
  • The urban model is beeing implemented (PP CITTA', see below).
  • The multi-layers snow model SNOWPOLINO is beeing implemented (SNOWPOLINO, see below). 
  • Work on external parameters for the mire parameterization is on-going (Juergen Helmert @DWD, see below). 
  • A resistance formulation for the effect of the vegetation canopy is being developped (Juergen Helmert @DWD, see e.g. Ch. Sgoff, 2017).
  • Work on the usage of silk, loam, clay fractions instead of soil types is on-going (Juergen Helmert @DWD).
  • Work to support vertically inhomogeneous soil types is waiting for funding (Andreas Will @BTU).
    This requires re-writing the Richards equation. External parameters are available e.g. in HWSD and in BUEK 200 data set.
  • Adjustment of turbulence and surface parameters has started (Andreas Will @BTU).
  • A major revision of the roughness layer is beeing developed in PT ConSAT, also improving the effects of the vegetation canopy and the description of water-phase transitions at the surface (see below)
     
• Major changes to the surface module are expected from the ICON seamless project (see below)

VEGETATION phenology

• A substantial inter-annual variability of the start and of the end of the vegetation season is observed, which may limit the usefulness of climatology based data set for describing LAI (see e.g. here).
• Two approaches based on Polcher (1994) and Knorr et al. (2010) for simulating the seasonal cycle of phenology as function of temperature were tested by Jan-Peter Schulz (see here).
• A sensitivity study has been conducted by A. Pauling / MCH to evaluate the impact of using a phenology model instead of a LAI climatology, using COSMO-7 over the period 01.2011 - 10.2011:
  a large sensitivity of the near surface temperature (up to 1K in the monthly mean over large regions) but a mixed impact on the performance scores have been observed.
• Besides the inter-annual variability of the start and of the end of the vegetation season, the effect of the crops, and the response of the leaf area index to the environmental conditions
  are key elements which would benefit from an improved representation of the vegetation cycle. Some preliminary studies lead my Merja Tölle are available:
  overview, seasonal phenology (1), seasonal phenology (2), land surface data sets. 
• In the frame of the ICON seamless project (DWD, MPI), the JSBACH land component of the MPI earth system model is beeing introduced in the ICON model and tested in NWP mode.
  This alternative to the TERRA model contains a phenology model, in particular the leaf area index is not prescribed anymore, and all elements required to represent the climate-carbon dynamics.
  Note that the current goal of this action is to take the best elements of TERRA and JSBACH in order to build a new land model best suited for both NWP and climate simulations.
• [Finished] COSMO PT VAINT, 09.2020 - 05.2022
  • PT plan, COSMO GM 2020, ICCARUS 2021, COSMO GM 2021, ICCARUS 2022-1, ICCARUS 2022-2, code repo on GitHub
  • Code owner after end of project : Juergen Helmert / DWD
  • Goal: Improving the current phenology of vegetation and photosynthesis in the COSMO model. Preparing the work for a future implementation in the ICON model.
  • Final report available here

MIRE parameterization (status, see also WG work plan)

• Mire is an important soil type in large part of Russia, and a specific parameterization has been developed by Alla Yurova.
• TERRA-MIRE is available in COSMO from version 5.06 (itype_mire=1).
• Positive impact on wind gusts and PBL temperature in regions with significant fraction of mires.
• Current limitations: evapotranspiration, fixed water table, dry bogs are not captured in the external parameters.
• Work on external parameters ongoing at DWD (Juergen Helmert): 
  upgrade EXTPAR for using ESA CCI mire fraction field together with GlobCover for other land-use classes (to avoids a full switch to ESA CCI).

URBAN model (overview 01.2020)

• Simulation of the urban effects is possible with TERRA-URB, developed by Hendrik Wouters (see e.g. paper2016, poster2017, update2017, Moscow2018, user guide).
  Priority tasks AEVUS and AEVUS II have been defined to implement, test and tune TERRA-URB in the official COSMO code, in a NWP context.
• [Finished] COSMO PT AEVUS, 09.2017 - 09.2019
  • PT plan, PT intro, meeting AEVUS 2018, status report 08.2018, presentations Torino 12.2018,
    Varentsov Report ICCARUS 03.2019, minutes ICCARUS 03.2019, Minutes Ghent 05.2019,
  • Final report available here
• [Finished] COSMO PT AEVUS II, 10.2019 - 06.2021
  • PT plan, minutes kick-off, minutes Napoli 12.2019, web meeting 03.2020 (minutes, MV, MD, ARPA, CMCC), minutes web meeting 04.2020, web meeting 05.2020 (minutes, MV, ARPAP, CMCC) 
  • Final status
    > pronounced improvement in urban regions is observed, even for medium size cities (urban heat island, wind circulation)
    > stable code release for urban effects in COSMO v6.0
    > code owner is Jan-Peter Schulz / DWD
  • Final report available here
• COSMO PT CITTA`, 07.2021 - 08.2024
  • PT plan, meetings
  • Lead: Jan-Peter Schulz / DWD
  • Main focus: implementation, testing and tuning of AEVUS developments in the ICON model, provision of most adapted external parameters through EXTPAR
  • Status: see here
• ECMWF is also investigating these issues, and is interested collaborating with COSMO (contact is Gianpaolo Balsamo)
  • For a urban tile development the experience gained in Urban MIPs is very relevant and simplicity of schemes seems a good property (https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/2010JAMC2354.1). 
  • Robin Hogan is interested in Urban modelling from a radiation point of view given EC-RAD has 3D capabilities nicely adapted for Urban Street Canyon effects.
    Since EC-RAD is of interest also in ICON this is an excellent opportunity to collaborate

  • Margarita Choulga & Souhail Boussetta are looking into urban parameters and their interpolation aspects into model grids at various resolutions (and similarly for water-bodies and land-use).
    For instance the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer dataset is a new and interesting dataset: https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu

  • ECMWF participated with the Single Column Model (SCM) version of the IFS to the SUBLIME project (http://www.met.wur.nl/sublime/). 

SNOW pack model

• The current single layer snow model in TERRA heavily depends on a good snow analysis to provide reasonable lower boundary conditions to the atmospheric processes (see e.g. slide 14 here). 
  The missing melting/freezing cycle within the snow pack is a serious limitation in spring time to correctly represent the melting of the snow pack.
  Consequently, the following applications would substantially benefit from an improved representation of the snow pack:
  • NWP in complex topography, particularly at the start and end of the snow season;
  • NWP in regions where few in-situ snow observations are available (e.g. Siberia);
  • representation of more complex phenomena, like deposition of aerosol on the snow pack (see Anika work below), interaction of snow and vegetation canopy (e.g. forest), snow over ice pack;
  • hydrological applications;
  • climate applications, in particular ICON seamless.
• The mutli-layers snow model by Ekaterina Machulskaya (Volodina et al. 2000, Machulskaya 2015) gives better results than the current operational snow model but still has some issues, and is not further developed 
  (see e.g. slide 2 of this document, TSA single and multi-layers refer to the existing models).
• [Finished] COSMO PT SAINT, 07.2017 - 12.2020 (new snow model available in COSMO 6.0)
  • PT plan, kick off, work plan 05.2022, extension 02.2020, status 08.2019, status 03.2021
  • Code owner : Juergen Helmert / DWD
  • New model essentially based on SNOWPACK (SLF / Davos), which provides a very good basis for any sort of future developments.
  • Achievments: fully tested multi-layer snow model in COSMO release v6.0, both CPU and GPU capable, and preliminary code base for ICON.
• [On going] WG task SNOWPOLINO, 01.2021 - ...
  • Status 03.2022
  • MeteoSwiss is currently integrating SNOWPOLINO into ICON, with a first version planned by the end of 2022. A revised version including an implicit solver is planned by June 2023.
  • SNOWPOLINO is implemented as a separate module, outside of TERRA, making this development compatible with any soil module finally adopted in the final version of ICON seamless.
    Implementation design is reviewed by Guenther Z. 
  • Resources at MeteoSwiss are not secured (Varun S. contract till 03.2023, Sascha B. not on a permanent position).
  • Additional resources welcome... please communicate interest to WG3bC!

• Christian Steger / ETHZ is working on the effect of the topography on the snow pack, using the COSMO radiation correction scheme (lradtopo=.true., see here).

• Anika Rohde / KIT has introduced the effects of deposited aerosols on snow albedo (see this presentation and her PhD thesis); this work is currently implemented on top of Ekaterina M. snow model.

SNOW pack analysis (also related to WG1)

• Different packages are used at different centers
  • DWD: Cressman analysis of snow depth observations + model first guess + NOAA snow mask
  • MCH: Based on DWD software (without latest developments) + some tuning + SEVIRI / MSG instead of NOAA snow mask
              Motivation: higher temporal resolution of SEVIRI / MSG leads to improved snow mask (see here)
  • RHM: SNOWE: observation driven snow model at SYNOP locations used to correct the Cressman analysis + NOAA snow mask
              (the residual between the Cressman analysis and the observation driven snow model are computed at SYNOP locations and interpolated on the model grid)
              Motivation: a correct analysis of the snow cover is particularly challenging over Russian territory, see here
              Note: defined as COSMO software since COSMO GM 2017, continuous development by our russian colleagues
              Availability: the full package, called SNOWE, is available here. See here and here for a full description.
              Additional data: A full SNOWE based analysis, for winter 2018-2019, at all European SYNOP stations, has been prepared by our colleagues at RHM and is available here (zipped ASCII files)
• Meeting of COST action ES 1404 WG3 at Offenbach, on 2017 March 8th-9th (presentations here, summary here)
  • Snow mask: SEVIRI / MSG as processed at MeteoSwiss, using the high temporal update of the SVIRI imagery, is still state of the art
  • Snow mask: NOAA IMS (multiple sensor products) covers the Northern hemisphere, up to 1km grid, daily update, but without any associated quality flag
  • Data assimilation method: at NOAA, EnKF outperforms any other methods
  • Quality of the analysis depends very much on the access to dense enough in-situ observations network
• Persepectives
  • Current snow analysis shows deficits in presence of forest, in complex topography, and in regions with sparse in-situ observations.
  • In 2020, new developments have started at DWD (see here and here) and at MCH (see here); furthermore SNOWE is continuously developed at RHM. These develoments will continue, based on different approaches, but regular coordination meetings will guarantee a good information flow between the different groups, and detect possible synergies (currently no PT or PP is planned). Coordination meeting on November 18, 2020 (minutes, mch1, mch2, dwd1, dwd2, rhm1, rhm2).
  • Status MCH 10.2022 : a new snow mask is derived, using SNOWPOLINO driven by atmospheric analysis simulations. A comparison with the MSG derived snow mask shows (at least) comparable quality; but at a higher spatial resolution. This snow mask is now used in MeteoSwiss operational analysis.

  • Status DWD 09.2022 : new analysis system was implemented and tested successfully (proof of concept). However, the system currently only works for T_2M and snow parameters will be added in the near future. Timeline for a fully integrated system is September 2023.

 

Support activities

Model calibration

• Model parameter uncertainty is a major source of errors in regional climate and NWP model simulations (Stephens et al., 1990; Knutti et al., 2002; Webb et al., 2013).
  State-of-the-art NWP models are commonly tuned using expert knowledge, typically made once during the development of the model, for a certain model configuration, and is difficult if not impossible to replicate.
  It is questionable whether such a calibration is still optimal for different target regions (e.g. with a different climate) or for other model configurations (e.g. with an increased grid resolution).
  Furthermore, the lack of an objective process to re-calibrate the model is often a major roadblock for the implementation of new model features.
• In order to mitigate this problem, the method developed by Olmar Bellprat at ETHZ for climate applications has been extended and used in the priority projects CALMO and CALMO-MAX.
• Although this work is not fully consolidated, the code for the meta-model is available here, and a table of tuning parameters for the ICON model is available here.
• A list of model parameters suitable for model tuning and perturbation

• Currently no resources are available to pursue these developments... please communicate interest to WG3bC

[Finished] COSMO PP CALMO, 01.2013 - 12.2016 (objective model calibration, see here)

Project closed. Follow-up project CALMO-MAX (see below).

[Finished] COSMO PP CALMO-MAX, 06.2017 - 12.2020 (CALMO Methodology Applied on eXtremes, see here and here for the final report)

A practicable objective multivariate calibration method build on a quadratic meta-model was introduced in our previous project, and successfully applied.
However, due to many technical problems not all the original goals have been achieved. In particular, the effect of the soil memory has not been fully evaluated,
and the issue of finding a compromise between the computational cost of the method and the quality of the calibration could not be tackled.

Considering that (1) the multivariate calibration method has a strong potential for multiple applications in the NWP community, e.g. when using the model for a different climate or when introducing new parameterizations,
and (2) the fact that the previous project has shown that a quadratic meta-model is able to reproduce the dependency of the model quality on unconfined model parameters, the COSMO consortium started this follow-up project.

TERRA offline (or TSA, externalized soil module)

• The possibility to compute the surface module offline, driven by prescribed atmospheric fields (model analysis, observations), is important to efficiently develop soil & surface parameterizations.
  Also, when experimenting with different parameterizations, due to the long time scales typical of soil processes, a balanced state of the soil is only obtained after multi-years simulations.
  In this case too, an offline surface module is required to make the production of a balanced state efficient.
• Note also that externalized soil module capability is required to participate to some international projects like the COPERNICUS inter-model comparison (Gianpaolo Balsamo / ECMWF).
• A software to run TERRA offline, based on COSMO release 5.07, is available here (git master branch).
  See here for a detailed discussion of the characteristics of this tool (accuracy, spin-up time).
• A development version of COSMO/TERRA offline which contains SNOWPOLINO will soon be made available on GitHub (description with use cases here).
• There is a clear agreement by model developers for the absolute need for an offline soil module capacity in the ICON framework.
  This task will be proposed to the "ICON consolidated" team, but a solution can not be expected in the short term. 

EXTPAR (COSMO software for production of external parameters)

• See the Software page.
• Latest status report (09.2022).

• Inter-consortium collaboration should be encouraged, collecting experience about raw data, collecting local data from different countries,
  communicating with data providers, and, maybe, having a common software (supported by Gianpaolo Balsamo / ECMWF).  

SNOWE (COSMO software for snow analysis)

• See the Software page.

SRNWP data pool (soil, surface, and BL observations from national observatories in a common format)

• The goal is to support the development of SVAT models by providing good quality operational data from a limited set of well instrumented and high quality observation sites.
• Participating sites are Lindenberg (D), Payerne (CH), Capofiume (I), Sodankylaa (FI), Cabauw (NL), Toulouse (F), Debrecen (Hu), Valdaj (Ru) and Cardington (UK).
  Soil, surface, and boundary layer data are provided in a common format, both text based and BUFR.
  Data is available from 2006 onward, and updated with 12 months lagged time; but no more updates since 2018!
  Data is open to the research community.
  Data can be accessed here.
• Status of action reviewed at C-SRNWP Advisory Expert Team meeting, 04.2020 (minutes)
  • DWD is collecting and checking the data and willing to continue to do so, but the main problem is that for several stations it is difficult to get data regularly.

  • This dataset is useful and Met Service Directors should encourage their observations departments to make these measurements available (possibly on agenda of EUMETNET directors meeting, Autumn 2022)

 

Related activities

COSMO WG1 (data assimilation)

• Tasks of interest for WG3b: re-write and further development of current soil moisture analysis (minimization of T2m errors); soil moisture analysis using satellite soil moisture data; snow analysis.
  See here, section 6 task 3, for more.

COSMO WG3a

• Re-formulation of surface processes in the frame of PT ConSAT (Matthias Raschendorfer, see here)
  • Implementation of a semi-transparent canopy layer, thermally loosely coupled to the dense soil.
  • Introduction of an implicit treatment of the surface processes, including the treatment of dew, rime and snow at a rough surface, using a single linear system for the coupled heat equations. 
    This will drastically improves the numerical stability and is a prerequisite for a clean implementation of a skin- or canopy-layer as well as for a partial multi-layer snow cover.
  • Introduction of various aspects with regard to the impact of land-use roughness to near surface turbulence.
• Simulation of lake breeze (Andreas Will and Palash Gupta, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, see here)
  • Shows in paticular the importance of non dissipative dynamics and numerics, and of higher resolution soil type (it is not enough to reduce mesh size).

COSMO WG7

• An up-to-date list of unconfined model parameters (tuning parameters) is required, in particular, for model tuning and model perturbation.
  Such a list is maintained here as a common effort of WG3a, WG3b and WG7.

CLM community

• The CLM-Community (Climate Limited-area Modelling-Community) is an open international network of scientists who are using and developing the regional climate models COSMO-CLM and ICON-CLM.
• Within the CLM-Community, the Soil and Vegetation Working Group SOILVEG, here and here (requires autentication), provides a platform to discuss issues related to the land surface component of the COSMO and ICON models.
• Strategy and science plan is available here (see section 2.2.3 for soil & surface aspects).

ICON-Land & JSBACH

• ICON-Land is a framework for the modeling of land processes in ICON, developed at MPI-M. It can also be used as standalone land-surface model.
• Currently, specific process implementations include the JSBACH (JSBACH version 4) and the QUINCY model configurations.
• See this paper for an assessment of one recent release of JSBACH.
• Two significant differences between JSBACH and TERRA are (1) the treatment of tiles, (2) the treatment of vertical diffusion (integrated in JSBACH with vdiff, external modules for TERRA)
• Related papers: current development lines (05.2022).

ICON seamless (2022 - 2025+)

• The ICON seamless project (DWD, MPI-M) aims to provide one homogeneous, integrated seamless system for NWP, climate prediction and climate projections.
• The goal is to have a a system ready for pre-operational climate forecast in 2024.
• The project is structured in four expert groups (EG):
  Land (Wolfgang Müller & Linda Schlemmer), Atmosphere & Ocean (Peter Korn &  Barbara Früh), Experiments & Analysis (Barbara Früh & Wolfgang Müller), Coupled Data Assimilation (Roland Potthast & Kristina Fröhlich)
• A new land component is required to support climate simulations with ICON-NWP; the following steps are defined 
  • ICON-Land (holding JSBACH) + vdiff is coupled to ICON-NWP, providing in particular the simulation of the vegetation and carbon cycle missing in TERRA and required for climate simulations. This step is done, but some technical challenges remain (GRIB definitions for the large amount of new JSBACH output fields, performances on NEC). ICON-NWP/JSBACH has significantly larger errors than ICON-NWP/TERRA for NWP applications. Cycling of the forecasts using BaCy is possible.
  • TERRA is restructured in smaller (functional) components and integrated into ICON-Land (see here for a first design draft and here for associated GitLab issue)
  • ICON-Land, vdiff, and the interfaces are re-worked (supported by WarmWorld project) 
  • The module turbdiff and the transfer scheme are integrated into a 'vertical diffusion solver'
• Related papers: land-atmosphere coupling (presentation 05.2022 and comprehensive description), related activities (06.2022)

ICON consolidated (2022 - 2027)

• ICON community effort to improve modularity, performance, portability, and more scalable development. See first part of this presentation.
• Need for a very balanced and practical approach to modularization, which avoids over-design, is goal oriented, but also clear and lean to avoid to be stuck in many global and grown structures
  which mix various functionalities which should be well-sorted and easily accessible. 
• Detailed documentation available on this page of the DKRZ GitLab, look in particular to the proposed new dev process
• A first functional ICON-C version is planned for Q4 2023.

EXCLAIM project (2021 - 2027)

• Develop ICON model based infrastructures to run kilometer-scale regional and global climate simulations; see here for more information.
• In particular, the development of a Python framework for the model system ICON is planned in this project (2023 - 2026)
• Interest for urban modelling and for snow cover modelling, but will mostly use developments coming from ICON seamless project. 

WarmWorld project (2022 - 2026)

• WarmWorld is a project supported by the BMBF. The project has three overaching goals:
  • An ICON based coupled model configuraiton capable of being run, with an acceptable simulation quality, on km-scale (2.5km global grids or finer), with a throughput of >0.5 simulated years per day at the start of Phase 2 (planned for 2026).
    A focus is placed on an optimal configuration of cloud-microphysical, turbulent mixing, and land surface processes.
  • A first release of ICON-consolidated: an open source version of the fully coupled (land, ocean, atmosphere) ICON system refactored to enable its scalable development
  • An integrated workflow that exposes the information content of the ICON modelling system alongside IFS-based solutions and observational data in ways that leverage the intuition of users and supports innovation.

GLORI-A project

• Global-to-Regional ICON Alpine Digital Twin based on the ICON model (GLORI-A), with a focus on very high resolution and data assimilation in complex topography, a collaboration between Germany, Italy and Switzerland (see here)

More on ICON

• Main entry point to share information for ICON developer
• A general overview of ICON model state and development perspectives by Roland Potthast, 03.2022.
• Information about other related projects , aiming at running high resolution global climate forecasts (WarmWorld, HAMAM) can be found here

ECMWF

• Gabriele Arduini is working on the snow ML5 scheme (tested in ESM-SnowMIP and globally, see here).
• Joe McNorton is working on a simple urban tile testing plausible options (following Sue Grimmond Urban intercomparison results, see here).
• An internal working group labelled USURF is looking at near surface model biases and has published a short newsletter article.
• Margarita Choulga is working on GLDB v3 dataset (global 1km all gridpoints water bathymetry, see here).
• The survey of suitable global km-scale physiography fields (e.g. soil texture, land-use map, bathymetry, ocean-color, etc.) is of high interest for both NWP and reanalysis, so any suggestions for collaborations are very welcome.