1. BackgroundIn the past century, the global climate has been warming, which has a serious impact on ecology and environment, such as the rise of sea level, the melting of glacial, the reducing of permafrost, the drying up of river, and the increasing of mudslides, landslides and desertification.

Global change has become an important scientific issue and received more and more attention from scientists, policy makers and the public. Earth system numerical simulation is an irreplaceable research method of studying global change, and high-performance computing is its critical technical support.

Earth system numerical simulation has become an important research in a number of universities and institutions. Tsinghua University attaches great importance to it and establishes the Global Change Institute to cater the national needs of tackling global change. Tsinghua University also establishes the MOE (Ministry of Education) Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling based on its advantage disciplines, including computer science, environmental science, earth science, and mathematics, etc.

2. Professors and researchersAffiliated with Center for Earth System Science, the Lab. is composed of professors and researchers from Center for Earth System Science, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Department of Environment, Department of Mathematics and other departments with related disciplines in Tsinghua University. There are 27 staffs, including 10 professors, 10 associate professors, 5 senior engineers and 2 lecturers. One of them is a distinguished professor of “Changjiang Scholar”, and 5 of them are National Outstanding Youth Foundation winners. With perfect personnel and discipline layout, as well as reasonable structure in staff’s age and title, the Lab has a strong potential for development. The academic leaders of the Lab. are influential experts and scholars in the field of Earth system modeling.

3. Research direction and contentRelied on the strong disciplines of Tsinghua University, our Laboratory aims to carry out the study of Earth system numerical simulation, including the research of physical model, mathematical model, computational methods and computing support technology and application. It also attempts to promote the cross-disciplinary development and construction in Tsinghua, to improve Tsinghua’s research on Global Change and cutting-edge issues, and to help Tsinghua become a world-class research and talent-developing base for Earth system numerical simulation.

The main research directions and contents are as follows:

(1) Methodology for Earth system modeling includes component model research and development, numerical method, coupler technology, parallel algorithm, and model evaluation.

(2) Geoscience data integration includes multi-sources data collection and quality assessment, massive data storage, access and transmission, multi-source multi-scale observational data integration and sharing, data visualization and diagnostic analysis for Earth system modeling.

(3) High performance computing support technology and application includes the HPC architecture, supporting tools for numerical simulation, software technology, platform construction and application promotion for Earth system modeling.