Linking coastal flooding impacts and climate change within the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM)

With world-leading supercomputing resources and investments in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), the Department of Energy is aiming to integrate the impacts of Earth system processes on coastal regions into its future climate simulation capabilities. The ability of the E3SM model to provide regional refinement in all of its major components presents an opportunity to resolve coastal flooding processes due to the interaction between sea level rise and extreme events. This goal is supported by research across a number of E3SM “ecosystem” projects including: the E3SM project, which develops the coupled model configurations for climate applications, the Integrated Coastal Modeling project, which focuses on land/river/ocean coupling and estuarine dynamics such as tides and storm surge, and a DOE Early Career project that is developing a multi-resolution coupling approach for coastal flooding. Together, these efforts provide essential capabilities that leverage exascale computing technology to make DOE a leader in the assessment of climate change impacts on coastal regions. As a demonstration of these efforts, we will show the results of a validation study that uses E3SM to hindcast the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. in 2012.