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Surface albedo is critical to understanding the Earth's energy balance. It emerges that snow grain shape and internal mixing of impurities are both important to getting this right, but until now these have not been incorporated into Earth System Models. This paper appears to be the first time that these effects have been included in an Earth System Model.

This paper introduces Firedrake, a new automatic system to generate code and solve partial differential equations using finite element methods. This capability is a core need of many models, and consequently a source of significant redundant software development effort. Because it does not prescribe a particular set of equations, the Firedrake software is applicable to a wide range of geoscientific models. Firedrake demonstrates remarkable computational efficiency, scaling beyond 12,000 computing cores. It is also free-libre open source software, contributing to improvements in scientific computational replicability and reproducibility.