nextGEMS turns one!

nextGEMS 1st anniversary

Today, the first of September 2022, marks the One-year anniversary of nextGEMS! On this occasion we have held a seminar to look back into this first year. We have collected quite a diverse list of accomplishments: around 80 nextGEMS members to date, 2 hackathons, as well as 2 little-hackathons, two babies and a third one on it’s way within our nextGEMS community, over 600 followers on Twitter, 16 videos and 1 NextCalendArt.
Around 70 participants joined the online session, being welcomed by Bjorn Stevens and Irina Sandu with an insight into the project and a discussion on the suprises, bumps and hurdles of the past year. They were followed by the updates and perspectives from the four project themes: Storms&Radiation, Storms&Land, Storms&Ocean and Storms&Society.

Even when struggling with technicalities and a challenging workflow, it is always fun to tackle these hurdles within the nextGEMS community, to encounter bumps and to learn from going over them. This anniversary seminar has shown how projects such as nextGEMS contribute to the advancement of climate science through the improvement of modelling performances in ICON and IFS (see also our Blogposts).

We are also expecting changes in the year to come. Not only did the project office get expanded but a sister project is born as well: the WarmWorld project – Better | Faster | Easier is joining the efforts of nextGEMS. In addition, our weekly Office Hours are changing format and are now Storms&Science, with our subthemes organizing theme-related science talks and discussions.

The preparation for our Cycle 3 hackathon is already at full speed. Following the spirit of the Cycle 2 hackathon, we will come together once again in Madrid at the end of May 2023 and round up the model development phase, before the application phase starts.