Funding Agency

The promotion of education, science and research is the core focus of the BMBF and this is reflected in the development of the funding made available to different research fields. The current FONA (Forschung für Nachhaltigkeit, or Research for Sustainability) aims at promoting sustainability and climate protection. This referes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), particularly, SDG 13 "Climate Action". The ITMS is intimately linked with this SDG, as it provides a basis for independent estimation of anthropogenic GHG emissions. Thus, by providing funding to climate protection related projects like the ITMS, the BMBF contributes towards the Federal Government's Hightech strategies for climate change adaption. more

The German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) is a national service facility and an essential partner for climate research. Our high-performance computers, data storage systems, and services form Germany's central research infrastructure for simulation-based climate science. Climate simulations, in particular, require supercomputers and data storage systems of the highest performance class. The LEVANTE supercomputer is optimally tailored to the data-intensive requirements of climate science and is one of the world's most powerful computers used for scientific purposes. National projects can apply for access to the resources at the DKRZ.

For example, LEVANTE is used in Module M to integrate ground-based and satellite-based greenhouse gas observations into the ICON modelling systems used by the DWD for weather forecasting. The MPI for Biogeochemistry in Jena will use LEVANTE to produce a regularly updated top-down estimate of natural CO₂ and anthropogenic CH₄ emissions using the existing CarboScope regional inversion.
In module Q&S, KIT IMKIFU will apply the process-based model LandscapeDNDC to Levante to calculate national and European bottom-up GHG fluxes for agricultural and forestry systems. Similarly, the MPI-BGC will work on LEVANTE using machine learning to calculate biogenic CO2 fluxes with high spatial and temporal resolution.

In addition to the reduction in computing time, ITMS also benefits from the direct linking of data streams within the DKRZ, as the data assimilation and inversion systems can directly access large data sets with prior information, e.g. generated and provided by the Q&S module on LEVANTE.
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