As part of the German Helmholtz society, the research centre Jülich provides TIER-0 supercomputer resources to the earth system modelling community, supporting the development of climate and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models as well as science applications in atmospheric composition and interaction of atmosphere and terrestrial systems.

The evolution of earth system models benefits from new developments in its compartments. The Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) is a software providing a framework for a standardized, bottom-up implementation of Earth System Models (or parts of those) with flexible complexity. "Bottom-up" means, the MESSy software provides an infrastructure with generalized interfaces for the standardized control and interconnection (=coupling) of "low-level ESM components" (dynamic cores, physical parameterizations, chemistry packages, diagnostics etc.), which are called submodels. MESSy is a multi-institutional project and its usage can be licenced to all affiliates of institutions, which are member of the MESSy Consortium (currently 19 members including Sun-Yat Sen University and China Meteorological Administration).

With the atmospheric global circulation model ICON developed by DWD and MPI-Met high computational efficiency and good scaling on massive parallel systems can be achieved. ICON uses non-hydrostatic dynamics, unstructured grids and allows for mass-consistent tracer transport and flexible nesting down to horizontal resolutions of a few hundred meters. The existing framework for atmospheric chemistry, ICON-ART, is used in operational NWP applications and standardized climate simulations, but it is experienced as not being flexible enough for enabling complex atmospheric chemistry. Thus, work is ongoing to attach the widely used interface MESSy to the ICON model to allow for internal coupling of well-developed process and diagnosis submodules. This effort asks for some adaptation to the ICON concepts (unstructured grids, nesting, alternative definitions of dynamic and tracer variables).

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