The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science initiated the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project in 2014 following a year of strategic planning, proposal development and review. The project was motivated by the need for a climate and Earth system model that would be adaptable and extensible to specific DOE mission needs for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Further, the future modeling system would be required to run efficiently on the next-generation Exascale computing systems envisioned to be the primary computing platforms at DOE Leadership Computing Facilities and the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center. In short, the project's mission was to build "A DOE Model for the DOE Mission on DOE Computers."

For over 25 years prior to the start of the E3SM project, Warren Washington and Jerry Meehl were partly supported by DOE to use climate modeling as a tool to study the impacts of energy production and use, principally the release of CO₂ into the atmosphere, on the climate system. Many of the participants at the E3SM planning workshops were close collaborators and colleagues of Washington and Meehl. The resulting project design heavily reflected their influences. Specifically, the following aspects of the E3SM strategy are directly linked to ideas developed by Washington and Meehl:

1. A release of a new model on regular schedule;
2. A primary focus on the coupled system rather than components;
3. Adoption of new computing technology quickly towards high-resolution simulation; and
4. Total integrated forcing as the driver of global temperature change.

In this presentation we will provide examples from the E3SM project for each of the above strategic elements and link them back to the work of Washington and Meehl.