Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM)

The Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) is a next-generation ice sheet model used for predicting ice sheet evolution and sea level rise in a changing climate. This model is freely available to the glaciology and climate modeling communities. It serves as the ice dynamics component of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), which is one of the first global climate models to include coupled, dynamic ice sheets.

The starting point for CISM is the Glimmer ice sheet model developed at the University of Bristol and elsewhere. CISM has been extended to include higher-order dynamical cores ("dycores") developed by two U.S. Department of Energy projects, the Ice Sheet Initiative for Climate Extremes (ISICLES) and Predicting Ice Sheet and Climate Evolution at Extreme Scales (PISCEES). The new dycores have contributed to two major sea-level assessments, Ice2sea and SeaRISE.

Development of CISM has taken place through the CESM Land Ice Working Group and led by the Climate, Ocean, Sea-ice and Ice-sheet Modeling (COSIM) project of Los Alamos National Laboratory, with contributions from other Department of Energy laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as well as from universities including the University of Montana, the University of Colorado, New York University, the University of Bristol, the University of Edinburgh, Swansea University, and the University of Zurich. Recent funding for CISM development has primarily been through the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) programs.