A small eruption in Iceland in 2010 had a big impact on the economy, airlines, and people in Europe and worldwide. Forecasting eruptions and mitigating their effects requires better understanding of the precursory signals and their detection amongst other signals. One of the key geophysical signals is volcanic tremor which is observed before and during eruptions but is only phenomenologically interpreted. The project TREMOR, based at the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) and the University of Cambridge will exploit their extensive, multidisciplinary databases including recordings of recent eruptions and floods. It will overcome present shortcomings, such as badly constrained tremor locations through use of new location techniques, dense seismic networks and small source-receiver distances. These improvements are made possible by the FUTUREVOLC project (FP7, 2012-2016) which expanded existing networks in Iceland shortly before the Bardarbunga 2014/15 eruption. Preliminary results during the researchers PhD suggest that both pre-eruptive and eruptive tremor exist during this eruption and have different characteristics. The TREMOR project will continue from this point with the objectives to (i) systematically search for pre-eruptive tremor, (ii) characterise it with respect to eruptive tremor and other tremor sources such as floods, glaciers and hydrothermal boiling, (iii) find factors that affect its characteristics and (iv) understand the source mechanism better. If TREMOR is successful, pre-eruptive tremor can be introduced as an eruption precursor, not only with direct application at IMO, but potentially worldwide. This thorough study will form the basis of future research, as it will be disseminated through conference presentations, publication in peer-reviewed journals and communication to the public. It will further train and integrate the researcher into two effective, experienced, multidisciplinary research groups to strengthen professional maturity.

This proposal aims at establishing a Center of Excellence to prepare flagship codes and enable services for Exascale supercomputing in the area of Solid Earth (SE). ChEESE will harness European institutions in charge of operational monitoring networks, tier-0 supercomputing centers, academia, hardware developers and third-parties from SMEs, Industry and public-governance. The scientific ambition is to prepare 10 flagship codes to address Exascale Computing Challenging (ECC) problems on computational seismology, magnetohydrodynamics, physical volcanology, tsunamis, and data analysis and predictive techniques for earthquake and volcano monitoring. The codes will be audited and optimized at both intranode level (including heterogeneous computing nodes) and internode level on Exascale architecture hardware prototypes (co-design approach). Preparation to Exascale will also consider code inter-kernel aspects of simulation workflows. First, ChEESE will develop Pilot Demonstrators (PD) for scientific problems requiring of Exascale computing on near real-time seismic simulations and full-wave inversion, ensemble-based volcanic ash dispersal, faster than real-time tsunami simulations and physics-based hazard assessments for seismics, volcanoes and tsunamis. Second, pilots will serve to enable services on urgent computing, early warning forecast of geohazards, hazard assessment and data analytics. Selected pilots will be tested in an operational environment and made available to a broader user community. Additionally, and in collaboration with the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), ChEESE will promote and facilitate the integration of HPC services to widen the access to codes to the SE users community. Finally, ChEESE aims at acting as a hub to foster HPC across the Solid Earth Community and related stakeholders and to provide specialized training on services and capacity building measures.

ICELINK will bridge the knowledge gap between climate models, ice-flow models, satellite observations and in-situ observations to accelerate the understanding of how glaciers and ice sheets in the North Atlantic respond to climate change, and their impacts on climate and ecosystems. Observations in the past decades have alerted for the rapid changes in land ice in this region. Record temperatures, melting ice and increased fresh water flux may destabilise the atmosphere and ocean circulation, with severe consequences for regional weather system, sea level rise, and affecting Europe and beyond. An improved understanding of trends and variability of ice evolution is important, and ICELINK will address this challenge by integrating Earth Observation data, in-situ observations and ice flow and climate models into an improved understanding of the processes that control the evolution of glaciers. Through improved understanding of snow, surface mass balance and the ice dynamical response to meltwater runoff, ICELINK will provide new knowledge of the response of Icelandic glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet to global warming and the impacts on climate and ecosystems. ICELINK will engage closely with local communities to co-develop and disseminate new knowledge, needed to support adaptation strategies, mitigate risks and enhance their resilience. A novel approach in ICELINK is to investigate the effect of increasing surface melting on ice evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet by using Icelandic glaciers as a data-observation laboratory for understanding the response in a warmer world with more melt. The improved models and new insights will feed into the World Climate Research Programme’s Cryosphere Project, IPCC, IPBES, assist development of Copernicus, and support the Destination Earth Initiative. ICELINK will produce results that are in high demand in order to plan and adapt for the future.

With present computational capabilities and data volumes entering the Exascale Era, digital twins of the Earth system will be able to mimic the different system components (atmosphere, ocean, land, lithosphere) with unrivaled precision, providing analyses, forecasts, and what if scenarios for natural hazards and resources from their genesis phases and across their temporal and spatial scales. DT-GEO aims at developing a prototype for a digital twin on geophysical extremes including earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and anthropogenic-induced extreme events. The project harnesses world-class computational and data Research Infrastructures (RIs), operational monitoring networks, and leading-edge research and academia partnerships in various fields of geophysics. The project will merge and assemble latest developments from other European projects and Centers of Excellence to deploy 12 Digital Twin Components (DTCs), intended as self-contained containerized entities embedding flagship simulation codes, Artificial Intelligence layers, large volumes of (real-time) data streams from and into data-lakes, data assimilation methodologies, and overarching workflows for deployment and execution of single or coupled DTCs in centralized HPC and virtual cloud computing RIs. Each DTC addresses specific scientific questions and circumvents technical challenges related to hazard assessment, early warning forecast, urgent computing, or resource prospection. DTCs will be verified at 13 Site Demonstrators (SD) and their outcomes will contain rich metadata to enable (semi-)automatic discovery, contextualisation, and orchestration of software (services) and data assets, enabling its integration to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The proposal aims at being a first step of a long-term community effort towards a twin on Geophysical Extremes integrated in the Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative.

The scientific ambition of ChEESE-2P is to prepare 11 community flagship codes to address 12 domain-specific Exascale Computational Challenges (ECC), enlarging the areas covered during the first implementation phase (computational seismology, magnetohydrodynamics, physical volcanology, and tsunamis) with two additional disciplines (geodynamics and modeling of glacier hazards). Codes will be optimized in terms of performance on different types of accelerators, scalability, deployment, containerization, and portability across current pre-exascale systems and hardware architectures emerging from the EuroHPC Pilots by co-designing with mini-apps. Optimization will also include heterogeneous single-node and multi-node performance, as well as continuous efficiency monitoring using the Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) metrics. Emphasis will be given on the uptake by science, public administration and industry, including training and capacity building in cooperation with National Competence Centers (NCCs). Codes and workflows will combine to farm a new generation of 9 Pilot Demonstrators (PDs) underpinned by concepts like multi-scale, multi-source, and multi-physics. The PDs will materialise in 15 Simulation Cases (SCs) representing capability and capacity use cases of particular relevance in terms of science, social relevance, or urgency (the capability SCs include 4 potential Scientific Grand Challenges, i.e. cases that can require an extreme-scale access mode). The SCs will produce relevant EOSC-enabled datasets and enable services on aspects of geohazards like urgent computing, early warning forecast, hazard assessment, or fostering an emergency access mode in EuroHPC tier-0/tier-1 systems for geohazardous events (earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes), including access policy recommendations. Finally, ChEESE-2P will liaise, align, and synergize with other domain-specific European projects and longer-term mission-like initiatives like Destination Earth.