When nextGEMS began in 2021, it set out with an ambitious goal: to bring global, kilometre-scale Earth system modelling from dream to reality. Four years later, as the project closes at the end of August 2025, the results speak for themselves — and for the hundreds of scientists, engineers, and collaborators who made it possible.

A Vision Realised

For the first time, multi-decadal global simulations at the kilometre scale — coupling atmosphere, ocean, and land — have been run with two different models: ICON and IFS-FESOM. Both now achieve an energetically consistent climate, a challenge that has plagued even long-established climate models, and can simulate decades in a matter of weeks, thanks to throughputs of up to 600 simulated days per day.

These breakthroughs lay the groundwork for the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin in the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative and set a benchmark for future climate research.

The Power of Community

From the start, nextGEMS set out to break down silos between climate science, high-performance computing, and model development. Over 25 institutions from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America joined forces, meeting online and — critically — in person at six hackathons.

Participant numbers grew from around 80 in the first cycle to over 130 in the third and fourth, with each meeting strengthening inter-institutional cooperation and cross-disciplinary exchange. The project’s open-data ethos, supported by tools like easy.gems, unified Intake catalogues, and example notebooks, made it easier than ever for participants to analyse terabytes of simulation output directly on the Levante supercomputer.

Hackathons: Where the Magic Happened

The six hackathons — in Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Hamburg, Wageningen, and Stockholm — were much more than coding sprints. They were week-long collaborative laboratories where model developers, climate scientists, HPC specialists, and sectoral users sat side by side.

Working directly on Levante meant no need to transfer enormous datasets; ideas could be tested in real time. Feedback from these sessions fed directly into the next model cycle, making the hackathons the heartbeat of nextGEMS.

Stockholm Hackathon Group photo - waving participants
Hackthon participants waving goodbye to the project at The Final Countdown Hackathon in Stockholm

Nurturing the Next Generation

Early-career scientists (ECSs) played a central role—not only as observers, but also as coders, analysts, and co-authors. For many, nextGEMS offered their first opportunity to contribute to a major international modelling initiative.

Hackathons, in particular, created a unique environment where ECSs could learn directly from senior scientists. They received guidance on project design and research methods that helped them avoid wasted effort while fostering creativity and innovation. These events also provided valuable opportunities to build personal networks. Meeting hundreds of international researchers laid the foundation for long-term collaborations and partnerships, while also helping young scientists advance their ongoing projects. One hackathon participant, for example, used the event to distribute surveys and recruit interview partners for research on the human factor in developing the nextGEMS Earth system model.

Beyond hackathons, nextGEMS enabled ECSs to strengthen both scientific and technical skills. These included recognizing the limitations of models in representing the climate system, managing complex data, and analyzing results from multiple high-resolution global simulations. As one early-career scientist from the University of Hamburg reflected:

“Engaging with a large community and diverse model applications encouraged me to think creatively and broaden my perspective. These experiences were essential in shaping my understanding of the field.”

By providing space for learning, mentoring, and collaboration, nextGEMS has ensured that its legacy lies not only in the data and models it produced but also in the new generation of scientists it has prepared to lead the field forward.

Science Meets Society

However, nextGEMS didn’t only speak to scientists. Industry stakeholders from energy providers and fisheries joined hackathons to explore how kilometre-scale simulations could inform their planning. For example:

At the 2025 Final Countdown Hackathon in Stockholm, a participant from the renewable energy company Statkraft described the experience as especially valuable. The informal setting allowed direct conversations with climate scientists and other participants about the challenges encountered when working with climate data and their opinions on its quality and usability. Additionally, the close collaboration with nextGEMS’ technical experts offered guidance on navigating specific technical aspects of the datasets, such as zoom levels and the Xarray grid.

Technical Milestones

Among the most notable achievements:

Scientific Insights

Working at kilometre scale allowed nextGEMS to explore climate processes in unprecedented detail:

These insights are not only scientifically exciting — they have direct relevance for climate-sensitive sectors and adaptation strategies worldwide.

Looking Ahead

While the Horizon 2020 funding chapter closes, nextGEMS’ legacy is just beginning. The data, tools, and community it built will feed into Destination Earth’s digital twins, inform policy-relevant research, and continue to train the next generation of climate modellers.

The km-scale era has arrived — and the people who made nextGEMS possible have ensured it’s here to stay.

For those who want to dive deeper, we invite you to visit our multimedia library, where you can watch videos exploring the project’s key outcomes in more detail — from behind-the-scenes insights at our hackathons to explanations of what kilometre-scale modelling means for science and society. You can also explore the full breadth of our scientific output in our Zenodo community. Among these, we especially recommend the newly released paper by Segura et al. (2025), “nextGEMS: entering the era of kilometre-scale Earth system modelling”, which captures the technical breakthroughs, collaborative spirit, and scientific discoveries that define the project.

Km-scale models, such as ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), play a vital role in the understanding and prediction of weather patterns and long-term climate trends. They can resolve smaller features, such as mesoscale eddies in the ocean, urban areas over land, and convective cloud structures in the atmosphere. These smaller processes are crucial for simulating a realistic uptake of heat by the ocean, or for extreme weather events and regional climate dynamics. However, while high-resolution models offer greater spatial accuracy, they come with the trade-off of significantly higher computational demands, making them more resource-intensive, and often require longer run times for simulations than low-resolution models. Although low-resolution models are computationally less expensive, they may overlook important small-scale processes, leading to less precise predictions in certain regions and different transient behaviour. Additionally, they may misrepresent extreme weather conditions. Balancing these trade-offs and developing improvements for high-resolution simulations are key for advancing climate models and are the focus of the nextGEMS project.

In the paper „Multi-year simulations at kilometre scale with the Integrated Forecasting System coupled to FESOM2.5 and NEMOv3.4“ by Rackow et al., a group of scientists, from several modeling centers, academia, and the wider nextGEMS community, present and evaluate the first multi-year-long km-scale model simulations, developed within the nextGEMS project, that connect the IFS to the ocean models NEMO and FESOM. The goal of the study was to present the different nextGEMS simulations and the scientific and technical progress that was made over the first three model development cycles. The authors present the data that emerged from the multi-year simulations, explain how to adjust the code of the ocean, atmosphere, and land models, and detail how to set up km-scale simulations that more accurately represent real-world processes. A particular focus was set on sea ice leads, the urban diurnal temperature cycle, and other phenomena, including variability patterns such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO).

The IFS-FESOM model that emerged as a result of the nextGEMS research better incorporates connections between the atmosphere, land areas, urban areas (e.g., cities), the oceans, and sea ice in the polar regions. These components are important parts of the climate system as their interactions regulate the Earth’s climate, drive weather patterns, and impact the environmental conditions on our planet.

This blog post discusses the five main technical changes that led to the improvement of the simulations:

1. Tackling the issue of water non-conservation

Processes like evaporation, condensation, and precipitation enable the distribution of water across the globe and between the land surface, the atmosphere, and oceans. They also change the phase in which water is present on Earth. However, the total amount of water remains nearly constant in the Earth system and should also be conserved in climate models, without artificial sources or sinks of water. This is especially important as the amount of water present in the system influences the representation of other key processes, such as extreme weather events, temperature rise, or the conditions for vegetation activity in different regions.

In their 2025 study, Rackow et al. found that in the IFS, the total amount of water does not remain constant over time. Instead, the model accumulates an increasing amount of water as simulations progress. The researchers traced back this issue of water non-conservation to the use of Semi-Lagrangian advection schemes. These schemes are implemented in the IFS to reduce computational costs when simulating atmospheric transport processes. However, they only approximate how air—and with it, water—is moved in the real world. As a result, the amount of water in the model after advection tends to be overestimated. This overestimation becomes more pronounced at higher spatial resolutions and when deep convective processes are not parameterized—that is, when they are resolved explicitly rather than represented through simplified equations based on numerous assumptions.

Rackow et al. (2025) addressed this problem of water non-conservation in high-resolution climate models by introducing a tool called global mass fixer. This tool corrects errors in the distribution of water and ensures that the total amount of water in the model is more realistically maintained at each time step. However, this approach also increases computational costs, and although it drastically improves water conservation on a global scale, some other imbalances still remain. To fully resolve these issues, the authors suggest the addition of a total energy fixer to address remaining inconsistencies in the model’s energy balance.

A more detailed explanation of the water non-conservation challenge is given by Tobias Becker and other members of the ECMWF in their 2022 newsletter article, available here.

2. Representing the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) radiation balance more realistically

The radiation balance refers to the difference between the energy the Earth receives from the sun and the energy it radiates back into space. This balance is crucial in climate modeling because it determines whether the Earth’s overall temperature is stable, warming, or cooling. In previous configurations, this balance was not accurately represented, leading to model drift and impacting the estimates of global warming from increased greenhouse gas concentrations in multi-year simulations.

To address this issue, the researchers made several adjustments focused on how clouds are represented and formed in the models:

  1. Alteration of cloud edge erosion rates to slow down the clouds’ process of breaking down and to make them persist in the model over a longer period
  2. Reduction of subgrid-scale cloud heterogeneity to slow down the process of accretion and therefore slightly increase cloud cover. 
  3. Adjustment of processes connected to mid-level convection to detrain in the liquid form and not in the ice form, which reflects the real-world behavior more accurately. 
  4. Simplification of how the model calculates the movement of moisture (semi-Lagrangian advection scheme) by switching from the complex method of cubic interpolation to a simpler one, namely linear interpolation. This change was applied to all forms of water except for water vapor, i.e., rain, snow, and ice. The linear interpolation is faster and uses less computing power while still being accurate enough for these calculations. Additionally, linear interpolation reduces the issue of water non-conservation before the global mass fixers are applied and increases the diffusion around updrafts.
  5. Enhancement of high cloud representation by reducing the size of ice particles to better align it with observational data. High clouds are clouds that form at high altitudes in the atmosphere, typically above 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) and are made up of tiny ice crystals rather than water droplets. These types of clouds are likely to occur more often in storm-prone regions, which underscores the importance of this model change for future predictions.

3. Simulation of intense precipitation

Deep convection is a process by which clouds can form in the atmosphere and build up high enough to reach an altitude where temperatures are below 0°C. Previous km-scale model simulations at 4 and 9 km without parametrizing this process  (Deep OFF) led to unrealistically intense and disorganized convective systems. To fix these issues, the researchers of this study refrained from turning off the parametrized deep convection processes completely and instead reduced the amount of mass transported at the base of clouds by a factor of six compared to the default configuration at a 9 km resolution. This approach provides a more realistic transition between parametrized and explicitly resolved convection at the km-scale. Following this, the updated model can more accurately predict extreme weather events and how they change in a warming climate.

4. Enhancing the eddy-resolving features in the mid- and high-latitude oceans

Eddies are small, swirling currents in the ocean that can significantly impact weather and climate. To capture these features more accurately, the model was refined with a resolution finer than 5 km in large parts of the global ocean, which allowed it to represent mesoscale eddies and sea ice leads. In combination with the high atmospheric resolution, this higher resolution of the ocean processes led to a better understanding of the complex air-ice-ocean interactions, revealing new aspects of how these three components work together. One important difference was to have the model explicitly represent the shape and make-up of sea ice leads and to represent the resulting heating of the atmosphere. By including these interactions, the model now simulates novel energy exchange and climate processes, with potentially significant implications for understanding extreme weather events in polar regions and the effects of climate change on sea ice and ocean circulation.

(from Rackow et al., 2025, Reproduced under CC BY 4.0.)

5. Improving the representation of cities and urban areas

The urban scheme, developed at ECMWF, provides a simplified method to improve the simulation of weather conditions in cities. Tested over multiple years, the scheme has demonstrated its ability to enhance the simulation of near-ground temperatures, particularly in urban areas. When combined with higher-resolution land static information and integrated into the IFS model, it significantly increased the model’s accuracy in representing land surface temperatures over urban areas, capturing both temporal variability (changes over time) and spatial variability (differences between urban areas and their rural surroundings). The IFS-based nextGEMS simulations are the first coupled climate simulations including explicitly the effect of urban areas. However, some limitations persist, such as discrepancies in nighttime temperatures, which may result, among other causes, from an inaccurate representation of heat emissions resulting from human activities, such as the heating of buildings or the operation of vehicles at night.

(from Rackow et al., 2025, Reproduced under CC BY 4.0.)

In addition to these five technical improvements, the study has also shown that km-scale models can improve the representation of atmospheric circulation and extreme precipitation events, and revealed previously unknown interactions between the climate components, which will be the focus of future research projects.

Source: Rackow, T., Pedruzo-Bagazgoitia, X., Becker, T., Milinski, S., Sandu, I., Aguridan, R., Bechtold, P., Beyer, S., Bidlot, J., Boussetta, S., Deconinck, W., Diamantakis, M., Dueben, P., Dutra, E., Forbes, R., Ghosh, R., Goessling, H. F., Hadade, I., Hegewald, J., Jung, T., Keeley, S., Kluft, L., Koldunov, N., Koldunov, A., Kölling, T., Kousal, J., Kühnlein, C., Maciel, P., Mogensen, K., Quintino, T., Polichtchouk, I., Reuter, B., Sármány, D., Scholz, P., Sidorenko, D., Streffing, J., Sützl, B., Takasuka, D., Tietsche, S., Valentini, M., Vannière, B., Wedi, N., Zampieri, L., and Ziemen, F. (2025).Multi-year simulations at kilometre scale with the Integrated Forecasting System coupled to FESOM2.5 and NEMOv3.4, Geosci. Model Dev., 18, 33–69, DOI: 10.5194/gmd-18-33-2025.

Caroline Mueller
Prof. Caroline Muller starting her keynote in the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg. Credits: nextGEMS.

At the recent Global Km-scale Hackathon, which took place between May 12-16th in the city of Hamburg, Professor Caroline Muller from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria delivered a compelling keynote on Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs). These systems represent a key element in understanding and predicting extreme weather and rainfall in a warming climate, hence accounting for a topic of high relevance within the nextGEMS community.

Mesoscale Convective Systems, explained

MCSs are large, organized clusters of thunderstorms that can span over 100 km and persist for hours, Prof. Muller explained. A familiar precursor to these systems is the so-called “popcorn convection”: scattered, isolated thunderstorms that resemble popcorn popping in the afternoon heat. However, when environmental and internal dynamics align, these scattered clouds can organize into powerful, long-lived systems.

Prof. Muller clarified these systems are central to global rainfall, especially in the tropics and subtropics. Furthermore, she emphasized their role in delivering intense precipitation events, making them highly relevant for climate models aiming to capture extreme weather patterns – such as those Earth system models used in nextGEMS.

What drives MCS development?

The keynote dissected the formation and evolution of MCSs, emphasizing both environmental and internal drivers. On the one hand, pre-storm environmental conditions play a key role in initiating MCS, such as atmospheric instability, vertical wind shear, moisture availability, and large-scale lift. However, internal dynamics are equally important in shaping their development, like cloud interactions, entrainment, cold pool dynamics, and self-aggregation mechanisms. 

Particularly, Prof. Muller focused on squall line regimes, referring to specific atmospheric conditions in which long and narrow bands of thunderstorms form and maintain themselves. These systems can stretch hundreds of kilometers and are associated with organized yet severe weather, including heavy rainfall, strong winds, and sometimes tornadoes. In squall line regimes the interaction between cold pools and wind shear is critical. This interaction helps transition disorganized storms into more organized and coherent mesoscale structures, enhancing the storm’s overall strength and longevity.

Global km-scale hackathon
Participants of the Global Km-scale Hackathon during Prof. Muller’s keynote at the Hamburg node. Credits: nextGEMS.

Insights from recent research and data-driven models

Another interesting aspect highlighted during Prof. Muller’s keynote was the increasing use of data-driven models to study these complex systems. One key research question was mentioned: Are environmental conditions or internal processes more critical for predicting MCS behavior?

Her conclusions suggest that internal feedbacks often dominate, especially in large systems exceeding 120 km. Nonetheless, she also pointed out the importance of neighboring systems to understand how MCSs don’t evolve in isolation; in fact spatial interactions and context matter significantly.

Prof. Muller’s keynote offered a rich overview of the physical mechanisms behind MCSs and posed important questions about how best to model and predict them. More specifically, her insights resonate with the broader goals of the diverse km-scale modelling communities attending the event: to capture the complex and multi-scale nature of convection in a changing climate.

A newly formed thematic group focused on renewable energy participated in “The Final Countdown” Hackathon, which took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from March 24th to 28th, 2025. The event brought together climate scientists and private stakeholders from the renewable energy sector, such as Statkraft AS from Norway, Vestas Wind Systems AS from Denmark, and Anemos from Germany. In total, seven participants were part of this group that sought after ways to use nextGEMS data for renewable energy applications.

The renewable energy group focused on extreme winds, among other aspects, by looking at how they will change during the years until 2050. Extreme wind is associated with different weather events and phenomena, such as tropical cyclones or storms. Emilie Byermoen, a team member from the Norwegian firm Starkraft, pointed out their work at the hackathon was based on experimentation, as the participants tried to test possible real-world future scenarios with the models. For instance, by warming the ocean temperatures and observing how that will influence wind patterns in the years ahead — an exercise of special relevance considering the raising temperatures of our planet.

Renewable energy group presentation
Researcher Thorsten Mauritsen presenting results from the renewable energy group at the Stockholm Hackathon. Credits: nextGEMS.

As the stakeholders attempted to discover how to use the nextGEMS in real planning for 20, 30, or 40 years ahead, climate scientists like Lukas Brunner contributed to the group, assisting with data and technical support for the industry representatives. Since nextGEMS data is new, very domain-specific, and large in volume, collaboration between diverse experts was advantageous, according to Brunner. 

For Starkraft representative Emilie Byermoen, “talking with the scientists about the problems they encounter when they work with the nextGEMS data, just chatting to get their opinion on its quality and what it is useful for” was very valuable. “It is something you would not get if you send an email, but rather from informal interactions,” she emphasized.

Indeed, one of the main challenges within the renewable energy team was understanding the data. “There are many specific technical aspects that I didn’t understand, although I am used to work with similar formats, but not this exact one,” Byermoenexplained. Nevertheless, the nextGEMS data seemed to hold great potential. For instance, in the case of wind speeds and rain, looking at extreme levels in the future is specially beneficial to observe at higher resolutions than traditional climate models. 

Despite its complexities, the nextGEMS models offer increased spatial resolution at 10, 5, and even less kilometers, unlike typical models that have 100 or even 200 km-scale resolutions. “I think this is what excites the industry partners about the data: for them 100 km is way too coarse to look at wind speeds or assess wind turbines placements, probably that is not a very helpful scale,” Brunner added.

Two months ago, from October 14 to 18, Wageningen University and Research (WUR) hosted the nextGEMS Hazard Hackathon. Nearly 80 participants from 17 countries across three continents traveled to the Netherlands for this unique event.

A New Approach to Collaboration

Unlike previous hackathons that divided participants based on the nextGEMS working groups Storms and LandStorms and OceansStorms and Radiation, and Storms and Society, this event took a fresh approach. Participants were organized into challenge groups focused on specific hazard-related topics, such as efficient data handling, the energy sector, fire weather, and extreme precipitation and temperature. These groups delivered remarkable insights and visualizations. Take a look for yourself:

Highlights of the Challenges

Efficient Data Handling Challenge

Led by Lukas Brunner and Olivia Martius, this group focused on providing global extreme indices for the HEALPix zoom level 9. They developed highly detailed plots, such as a comparison of surface temperature fields from the ICON and IFS models. One visualization revealed significant discrepancies of the annual maximum temperatures (txx) between the two models that were especially pronounced in North America and Australia. These results are likely due to differences in how the models simulate land-atmosphere interactions.

Energy Production Challenge

Coordinated by Menno Veerman and Edgar Dolores-Tesillos, this team analyzed weather-dependent energy production, in particular solar and wind energy. They explored the spatial patterns of each of these around the world and found that there is more capacity to produce wind energy over the oceans than on land, and a larger solar energy capacity in regions closer to the equator. In a case study approach, the team also discovered distinct spatial patterns of solar and wind energy production across Spain. Additionally, the researchers progressed a trend analysis for the region of Spain, to assess how the energy production capacity might change over time.

Fire Weather Challenge

The team led by Ralf Hand and Chiel van Heerwaarden focused on evaluating the potential of nextGEMS models to simulate realistic fire-prone weather conditions. They also sought to identify the factors driving potential changes in wildfire risk in the future. During their work, the team successfully modeled fire weather indices (FWI) as used by DWD, and also observed that humidity trends remain constant over time. However, they noted differences in the calculations produced by the IFS and ICON models, which require further investigation. Following this hackathon, the scientists plan to rerun these calculations using higher-resolution data to better understand how coarse versus high-resolution data impacts the results.

Extreme Precipitation and Temperature Challenge

Jonathan Wille, Jasper Denissen, and Birgit Suetzl led the extreme precipitation and temperatures and urban heat challenge. This group examined the simulation of temperature and precipitation extremes at different levels, from the global to the local scale. The participants explored various topics within this broader frame, including the visualization of urban heat extremes, future changes in extreme precipitation behavior, and the connection between precipitation extremes and river runoff in alpine regions.  They found that changes in the frequency of heavy precipitation events depend on the rarity of the event and the modeling approach. For instance, a 1-in-3-year event occurs 5% more frequently in IFS simulations and 20% more frequently in ICON simulations. The researchers also discovered that these changes vary by the region in which the precipitation events occur, with heavy precipitation events in the Northern Hemisphere becoming more frequent at locations further away from the equator.

Engaging Side Events and Workshops

In addition to working on their group challenges, participants engaged in several enriching side events. Paolo Davini and Matteo Nurisso from CNR-ISAC introduced the model evaluation framework AQUA, developed as part of the Destination Earth initiative (DestinE). During a workshop on energy storylines conducted by Eulàlia Baulenas and Dragana Bojovic, participants debated which nextGEMS data would be relevant for energy industry stakeholders and how the project could help them make more informed decisions. Experts like Nuria Sanchez from Iberdrola and Hester Biemans from WUR shared captivating insights on topics such as renewable energy and food security.

The Role of Hackathons and Collaboration in Climate Research

On the final day, the Storms and Society working group presented their ongoing efforts in knowledge co-production and communication strategies. Their outputs aim to bridge research and policy-making through storylines, policy briefs, and accessible Science Explainers that communicate complex research to the public in simple terms.

Hackathons like this Hazard Hackathon foster collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing, as emphasized by Bjorn Stevens, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. Stevens highlighted how nextGEMS contributes to broader climate modeling projects, including EERIE, WarmWorld, and DestinE. Thanks to the efforts of the nextGEMS community, DestinE successfully launched its system in June 2023, with its data now accessible to the nextGEMS community and the wider academic community via a newly released DestinE platform.

Inclusive Initiatives at the Event

However, not only scientific input and outcomes were at the focus of the Hazard Hackathon. The organizers also prioritized inclusivity by offering pronoun stickers for all attendees and rainbow lanyards for LGBTQIA2S+ community members and allies. These thoughtful gestures aimed to foster respect and acceptance for the diverse gender identities and sexual orientations within the nextGEMS community. For further reading on supporting the Queer community, attendees were encouraged to consult the HRC report on Being an LGBTQ+ Ally or explore resources provided by the EGU Pride group, which supports Queer individuals in geosciences and their allies.

The Future of nextGEMS: Transitioning Beyond the Project

Following three years of intensive knowledge creation, hacking, and collaboration, the nextGEMS project is now transitioning into its final phase. During the recent gathering, Bjorn Stevens initiated a discussion about the future of the nextGEMS community and its potential evolution beyond the project’s official timeline. As part of this dialogue, he announced an unprecedented event: the World Climate Research Programme Global KM-scale Hackathon.

This groundbreaking global hackathon is scheduled to take place from May 12–17, 2025, and will be hosted by multiple climate modeling institutes across the globe, including locations in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, China, Europe, India, Japan, North America, and South Africa. This unique, multi-continental approach highlights the collaborative and inclusive spirit of the climate research community.

To stay updated on the nextGEMS project and future events, including the final nextGEMS Hackathon, visit our news section and follow our social media channels.

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