MESSy and the natESM project
MESSy is an optional component of the natESM system in the National Earth System Modelling Project (natESM). natESM provides services for the national ESM community to create and promote a national Earth system modelling system. The project receive funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to support national modelling groups to further develop their components of the Earth system and integrate them with the natESM system.
The project’s ambition is to create a world-leading, multi-scale, seamless Earth system modelling system, usable in research, operational applications, training, and education. The natESM strategy is formulated in a white paper. The modelling system considers German expertise, does not exclude international components but avoids dependencies and has a fit-for purpose transparent governance structure.
To provide such a system, natESM supports scientists to…
- Share national resources and accelerate scientific and technological developments.
- Establish a new level of sustainable institutional collaboration to develop this system.
- Build a flexible infrastructure enabling configurations that allow resolution, length of simulation, complexity and ensemble size.
natESM provides trainings and workshops on different technical and scientific topics in the field of numerical Earth system modelling. The main support instrument of natESM is the direct support of national modelling groups and scientists through “sprints”. Sprints, focused on technical objectives and tethered to natESM resources, provide a flexible program tailored to the scientist’s research goals and timelines. This collaborative journey spans up to six months, fostering in-depth partnerships between the application scientist and the natESM Research Software Engineers (RSEs). natESM maintains an open call for proposals, enabling model development groups across Germany to become part of the national Earth system research community.
Until now, model developers of the Modular Earth Submodel System received support through four natESM sprints. Two sprints were finished successfully in 2023 and 2024. The topics were optimization of data transfers between host (CPU) and device (GPU) in MESSy (MESSy sprint report) and the coupling of MESSy and ICON via the Community Interface (ComIn; MESSy-ComIn sprint report). The currently running sprints (until 03/2025) focus on a revised functionality for data import in MESSy to be used with ICON and finalizing the coupling of MESSy and ICON via ComIn (list of accepted natESM sprints).