Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
Understanding and predicting the evolution of the ocean is crucial for improving climate projections and anticipating future environmental changes. A significant source of uncertainty in current oceanic climate models is the accurate representation of mesoscale ocean features, such as eddies and currents.
Silvestri et al. [2025] present a breakthrough in ocean modeling by leveraging GPU-specific programming strategies to accelerate computations drastically. A GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is a specialized processor designed to perform many calculations simultaneously and process large amounts of data. The model called “Oceananigans” resulting from this study enables routine mesoscale-resolving ocean simulations that were previously impractical due to computational constraints. This work marks a significant step toward next-generation Earth system models, paving the way for higher-fidelity simulations while managing environmental costs in terms of energy consumption.
These findings not only highlight the power of GPUs in climate modeling but also contribute to clarifying the roadmap for porting or redesigning other Earth system components. Moreover, the choice of the Julia programming language opens up numerous opportunities for automatic differentiation, which is fundamental to AI technologies, and for training young researchers in ocean modeling.
Citation: Silvestri, S., Wagner, G. L., Constantinou, N. C., Hill, C. N., Campin, J.-M., Souza, A. N., et al. (2025). A GPU-based ocean dynamical core for routine mesoscale-resolving climate simulations. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 17, e2024MS004465. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024MS004465
—Florian Lemarié, Associate Editor; and Stephen Griffies, Editor-in-Chief, JAMES