ESM Working group: Meeting notes 2026

Earth System Working Group
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Date: 14/4/2026
Chair: @dkhutch
Participants: 13

1. Admin and resource usage

  • Science Presentations: Spaces are regularly available for science presentations at ESM WG meetings. If you have any work that you would like to share with the community, please get in contact the ESM WG co-chairs @dkhutch, @tiloz, @ShayneM, @ctychung or @spencerwong. Presentations from recent conferences and workshops are welcome, as are informal updates on in progress work.

  • LG87 Resource Usage:

    • 435 kSU out of the 2MSU compute allocation has been used. The working group compute allocations have been increased this quarter, and there is an additional pool available which will be distributed to the working groups on a first-come-first-serve basis. If you have experiments you are interested in running, it is a good idea to add a proposal early in the quarter as this helps with resource allocation.
    • If you have any experiments you are interested in running with ESM WG resources next quarter, follow the proposal guidelines here to apply to use WG compute.
    • /g/data/lg87 recently came close to its 100TB limit. Recent cleanup has reduced the usage to 84TB, however, further cleanup of existing data including removing unused data and compressing outputs would be much appreciated. Freeing up space will allow for members to run new experiments.

  • Are you interested in running experiments for the CMIP7 fast track:

  • There are fast track experiments that CSIRO isn’t committed to running, such as the abrupt-0p5CO2 and aprupt-2CO2. Please see this post for a table of fast track experiments and the institutions assigned to run them. There is an opportunity for working group members to run unassigned experiments using working group resources. If you would be interested in running any such experiment, please get in contact with @RachelLaw.

2. Science presentation: Flux Corrections in Climate Models

@Dietmar_Dommenget presented his work on applying flux corrections in coupled climate modelling.

Method:

  • Flux corrections are commonly used to reduce biases a model’s mean state. For example to reduce biases in the SST mean state, and additional net heat flux can be provided to the ocean model. The added fluxes are time and location dependent, but don’t depend on the model state.
  • Flux corrections have previously been used to correct 3D atmospheric temperature, moisture, winds, land surface temperatures, ocean salinity and more.

History/examples:

  • Flux corrections were used in first generation GCMs to reduce biases in slab ocean SSTs.
  • Later coupled models with full ocean GCMs removed flux corrections due to them being viewed as artificial
  • Flux corrections have been used in several non CMIP areas such as seasonal forecasting, improving tropical cyclone forecasting, investigating SST warming patterns.
  • Examples from Dietmar’s research on flux corrections include investigation into the impact on mean state SST biases on global warming responses, and comparison of tuning and flux corrections as approaches for improving models.

Why use flux corrections:

  • Many feedbacks and processes are mean state dependent, meaning that flux corrections can improve model performance.
  • Model tuning can also be seen as artificial, may not perform as well, and is costly to perform

Example: ENSO performance in the ICON model

  • The ICON-XPP coupled model has a strong cold tongue bias and large biases in the Planton ENSO metrics. Dietmar has been investigating whether these biases can be improved via heat and wind stress flux corrections.
  • Flux corrections significantly improve the variability and processes metrics, including for example the equatorial mean SST, zonal mean precipitation, sst skewness, taux-SST and SSH-taux regressions.

3. UK Met Office user license agreement

  • Members from ACCESS-NRI partner universities ANU, UNSW, UTas (including AAD), Monash Uni and UniMelb who run ACCESS-AM, ACCESS-CM, ACCESS-ESM, ACCESS-rAM, or ACCESS-rCM will need to read and accept the new Terms of Use for the Agreement by 8 May 2026 in order to continue to use and access UKMO software and licensed material.
  • Please find instructions on how to do this and frequently asked questions here: Accessing UKMO licensed models.

4. ACCESS Community Workshop on Land and Coupled Modelling

  • The ACCESS Community Workshop on Land and Coupled Modelling will bring together the ESM and Land community working groups and will be held 31 August - 2 September in Melbourne. Abstract submission forms for the workshop will be out shortly.

Please feel free to correct any mistakes in these notes directly, or message @spencerwong with corrections.

Additional information