During the first and second reporting periods, EERIE has delivered major advances in the development, execution and exploitation of global eddy-rich Earth System Models (ESMs), with a focus on the climatic role of ocean mesoscale processes.
A central achievement of RP2 has been the successful production of the first coordinated, multi-model set of century-scale, fully coupled eddy-rich climate simulations, including kilometre-scale atmosphere (~9 km) and eddy-rich ocean resolutions. These simulations were completed across several modelling systems and now form the backbone of scientific analysis in WPs 5–12.
To enable efficient exploitation of these unprecedented datasets, EERIE established a modern, scalable and FAIR data ecosystem. Phase-1 outputs were quality controlled, standardised and published through ESGF, CEDA and WDCC, with additional fast access via eerie.cloud using Zarr, STAC catalogues and virtual datasets. Integrated visualisation and analysis tools substantially reduce time-to-science and support ML workflows.
Scientific evaluation during RP2 shows that EERIE models realistically capture key characteristics of the ocean mesoscale while identifying systematic weaknesses in regions with complex dynamics. These insights directly informed a refined Phase-2 strategy, shifting towards small ensembles of eddy-rich simulations to robustly quantify uncertainty and internal variability.
Further achievements include demonstrable improvements in large-scale circulation, air–sea coupling and the simulation of high-impact events, significant gains in computational efficiency, and the delivery of the first stable hybrid coupled climate model combining a dynamical ocean with an ML-based atmosphere.
