Construction of a Global Network for Collaborative Innovation Driven by "Two Engines"

QINGDAO, China, Nov. 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- At present, global climate change is a huge challenge that all mankind faces. It exacerbates extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones, heat waves, winter storms, floods and sea level rise, leading to serious impacts on agriculture, energy, industrial activity, ocean ecosystems, sustainable coastal development, resulting in billions of dollars of economic loss.

No country would be able to solve the global climate change issue alone. Since 2015, China's first national laboratory in pilot run - Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM) - has been devoted in building a global network for collaborative innovation and carrying out cutting-edge, strategic, fundamental and indigenous technological innovations on marine and climate.

Establish two overseas joint laboratories with US and Australia

It is a major challenge for the world to make accurate and detailed prediction of the Earth's climate on the basis of high-resolution computer and earth climate system model. To mitigate the negative impact of global climate change, QNLM, together with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Texas A&M University (TAMU), jointly promotes the construction of International Laboratory for High-Resolution Earth System Prediction (iHESP).

iHESP marks the second joint laboratory co-established by QNLM and leading earth science research institutes in the world, the first being the International Center for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR) in Hobart, Australia. On May 22, 2017, QNLM and CSIRO jointly initiated CSHOR. In accordance with the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative, CSHOR aims to bring together global marine resources and enhance innovation, to collaborate on southern hemisphere oceans and Antarctic research, to train marine study talents and to promote the development of marine science and technology in China.

Based in both United States and Qingdao, iHESP will become another high-end innovative platform of win-win cooperation to cope with climate change. It will focus on the research of high-resolution earth system prediction and pool more resources to actively promote the development of the model and to raise the scientific awareness of the multi-scale internal interaction of earth system. It will enhance the cooperation with Future Earth, IGBP, WCRP and other international programs, aiming to become the global center for earth system simulation and prediction research.

In accordance with the principles of "Openness, Mobility, Collaboration, and Sharing", QNLM will also cooperate with Germany, Russia, the United States and other countries to establish five international joint research centers in total and more than one hundred open studios in order to build the global collaborative innovation network and become a world-class comprehensive marine research center.

Set up open platforms for climate change researches

QNLM has been continuously deepening the structural reform of science and technology, carrying out basic applied researches and promoting the construction of a number of public research platforms and scientific research facility clusters.

At the end of 2016, the High Performance Computing Center in QNLM was put into use with the world's fastest computing speed in marine field. Currently, the researchers are conducting researches on exa-scale supercomputing, viewed as "the next crown of supercomputing". What's more, in cooperation with China Telecom Group, National Supercomputing Center in Jinan and Wuxi, QNLM centers on major technological innovation projects to build the first international supercomputing network. QNLM will work unswervingly to build a platform of major facilities and infrastructure to maintain our leading position in the world.