Long-term Projections
Running the climate system forward a century at a time, without the model drifting off course.
Image: DKRZ
Stability Over Speed
A century-scale climate projection is not simply a longer weather forecast — it is a fundamentally different computational problem. Where NWP optimizes for wall-clock turnaround, ESM optimizes for bit-for-bit numerical stability across billions of timesteps, ensuring that small floating-point errors never accumulate into a spurious climate trend. Malgukke architectures pair CPU-dense nodes for the coupled ocean-atmosphere-ice solvers with a storage fabric built to hold the resulting archive for decades.
HPC Solution Architecture: Model Spin-up to Century Archive
A coupled Earth System Model pipeline, as run on DKRZ's Levante for the ICON model:
Running on the TOP500: Levante
Levante — German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), Hamburg
Levante is ranked No. 164 on the November 2025 TOP500 list and is the dedicated Earth system research machine for Germany's climate community. Built on Atos BullSequana XH2000 technology with roughly 390,000 processor cores, Levante is the only European system that has run the fully coupled, GPU-accelerated ICON Earth system model at a global 1.2 km resolution — the resolution needed to represent convective clouds directly rather than through parameterization.
Yes — this is a real, currently operating TOP500-ranked system, directly used by MPI-M and DKRZ for the ICON simulations described on this page.
Voices from the Field
Researchers using Levante and Earth system models for century-scale projections:
Jochem Marotzke
Director, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
On simulating the global climate system at 1 km resolution for the first time — made possible only by Levante.
Read articleDaniela Matei
Senior Research Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
On decadal-to-interannual climate predictability and the role of ocean circulation in shaping long-term projections.
Read article