EarthLab outreach hall [Image: ZHU Jiang]

The Earth is a sphere, and it comprises spheres: the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere — in short, all of the cycles that interact to influence Earth’s weather and climate.

On June 23, in order to better study how these different planetary spheres interact and the impact they have, China launched EarthLab.

The lab’s researchers will begin trials to demonstrate the facility’s ability to integrate simulations and observations in order to make more accurate projections, and to provide scientific foundations for the prediction and mitigation of things like natural weather disasters.

An introduction to the facility was published on June 23 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

“Since the Earth system is extremely large and complex, traditional theories and observations are too limited to meet the overall requirements of the scientific research community,” said Zhang He, EarthLab researcher affiliated with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and corresponding author of the study.

Simulation by CAS-ESM 2.0, the key software systems of EarthLab [Image: ZHANG He]

EarthLab is the first comprehensive virtual Earth laboratory in China which can be used to simulate the physical climate system, environmental systems, ecological systems, solid earth systems, and space weather systems as a whole, using a high-performance scientific computing platform.

In partnership with Tsinghua University, IAP began construction of EarthLab in 2018. It is expected to become fully operational and open to universities and research institutes across the world in 2022.

Weather, climate and environmental disasters occur frequently and seriously, with grave losses of life and property. Consequently, a global Earth simulation system, as well as a high-precision regional environmental simulation system, is urgently needed to better predict climate and environment variability, as well as prevent and mitigate natural disasters more effectively.

“Our ultimate goal is to predict Earth systems on a vast range of time scales, from seconds to hundreds of years, and of spatial scales, from 10 meters to millions of meters,” Zhang said.

Along with other Earth simulators around the world, the development and construction of EarthLab will advance the understanding not only of the Earth’s spheres and their interactions, but also the Earth’s past, present and future.

EarthLab’s Chinese name is Huan, which means “a place as vast as the Earth where people live and upon whose land they depend”.

Source: Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP),

Chinese Academy of Sciences