Co-chef: Thomas Fauchez (NASA GSFC / American University): thomas.j.fauchez@nasa.gov
Co-chef: Denis Sergeev (University of Bristol, UK): denis.sergeev@bristol.ac.uk
What is CUISINES?
In the upcoming era of the James Webb Space Telescope, it becomes timely to focus community effort on benchmarking, comparing, and validating the performance of exoplanet models, both with respect to other models and to observations (when available).
This is the objective of the Climates Using Interactive Suites of Intercomparisons Nested for Exoplanet Studies (CUISINES) NExSS Science Working Group. The first intercomparison that happened within CUISINES is the TRAPPIST-1 Habitable Atmosphere Intercomparison (THAI). THAI compares the ExoCAM, LMD-G, ROCKE-3D and UM Global Climate Models (GCMs) on simulating TRAPPIST-1e. NExSS has hosted a successful THAI virtual workshop in September 2020 that brought together a community of 125 people and led to a peer-reviewed workshop report (https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01091). THAI protocol, data and results are available at THAI webpage.
With CUISINES we expect to expand THAI beyond only GCMs and rocky planets, to perform intercomparison on any exoplanet model, from 3-dimensional general circulation models (GCMs) with or without interactive chemistry, Energy Balance Models (EBMs), 1D climate models, analytical models, and radiative transfer models from rocky to gas giant planets.
This project will identify and – where appropriate – smooth out differences between model predictions within the same model category (i.e. GCM vs GCM) or between categories (e.g. GCM vs. 1D climate models). It will also evaluate the model performances with comparisons to data (when available), as well as their computational efficiency. CUISINES data, multi-model outputs and scripts will all be made publicly available in a standardized format to guarantee easy reproducibility of the results.
The CUISINES datasets, protocols and results CUISINES are accessible here.
To subscribe to the CUISINES email list,
please send an email to CUISINES-NExSS-join@lists.nasa.gov
and include the word “Join” in the subject line or the body of the message.
Watch this presentation about the CUISINES framework and motivations:
CUISINES is funded by SEEC, a NExSS-affiliated team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center led by Prabal Saxena, Erika Kohl, and Christopher Stark (Co-PIs). You can find more information about SEEC here.