CTD rosette at sunrise aboard the research vessel Nancy Foster (Credit: Cassia Busch, USGS, Public Domain)
SUBTOPIC

Coastal Protection & Carbon Research

Turning scattered pCO2 readings into a global map of where the ocean is quietly absorbing our emissions.

Image: Cassia Busch, USGS

From Sparse Measurements to a Global Carbon Sink Map

Direct pCO2 measurements cover only a small fraction of the world's oceans, with the Southern Ocean especially undersampled. Reconstructing a complete global field means combining satellite data, autonomous floats, and even citizen-science sailboat measurements through GPU-accelerated Optimal Interpolation and machine learning — while simultaneously running storm-surge digital twins that give coastal megacities real-time warning of sea-level hazards. Malgukke's architectures are built to run both workloads on the same GPU-dense infrastructure without one starving the other of bandwidth.

HPC Solution Architecture: Sparse Data to Carbon Budget

A machine-learning-assisted pCO2 reconstruction pipeline, comparable to GEOMAR/MPI-M workflows:

Sparse pCO2 Observations Buoys, floats, sailboats Reconstruction Core CPU Nodes Optimal Interpolation GPU Nodes ML gap-filling model Global pCO2 Gap-free reconstructed field Storm Surge Twin Coastal risk simulation Carbon Budget & urban early warning Model-vs-observation residuals flag under-sampled regions for the next campaign

Running on the TOP500: Levante

TOP500 — NOVEMBER 2025 LIST

Levante — German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), Hamburg

Levante is ranked No. 164 on the November 2025 TOP500 list. It is the shared computing backbone for the MPI-OM/HAMOCC ocean biogeochemistry model used by MPI-M and GEOMAR to build the global pCO2 maps behind the marine carbon-sink estimates described on this page — including the sailboat-augmented reconstructions published in 2026.

Yes — this is a real, currently operating TOP500-ranked system, directly used for the carbon-sink reconstruction workflow described here.

#164
Global TOP500 Rank
130+
Petabytes of Storage

Voices from the Field

Researchers improving global estimates of the ocean's carbon uptake:

Jacqueline Behncke

GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (formerly MPI-M)

On using machine learning and citizen-science sailboat data to correct systematic underestimates of the Southern Ocean carbon sink.

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Toste Tanhua

Marine Chemist, GEOMAR / Co-Coordinator, GLODAP

On how research-vessel expeditions and long-term observatories built the global ocean carbon dataset (GLODAPv2) underlying today's carbon-sink models.

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