Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET): A Data Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Climate Research
Dean N. Williams · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2011
For the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), the ESG-CET team has led international development and delivered a production environment for managing and accessing ultrascale climate data. This production environment includes multiple national and international climate projects (e.g., Couple Model Intercomparison Project, Community Earth System Model), ocean model data (such as the Parallel Ocean Program), observation data (Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, and so forth), and analysis and visualization tools, all of which serve a diverse community of users. These data holdings and services are distributed across multiple ESG-CET sites (such as LANL, LBNL, LLNL, NCAR, and ORNL) as well as at unfunded partners sites such as the Australian National University National Computational Infrastructure, the British Atmospheric Data Centre, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the German Climate Computing Centre, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory. More recently, ESG-CET has been extending services beyond data-file access and delivery to develop more detailed information products (scientific graphics, animations, etc.), secure binary data-access services (based upon the OPeNDAP protocol), and server-side analysis capabilities. These will allow users to request data subsets transformed through commonly used analysis and intercomparison procedures. As we transition from development activities to production and operations, the ESG-CET team is tasked with making data available to all users seeking to understand, process, extract value from, visualize, and/or communicate it to others. This ongoing effort, though daunting in scope and complexity, will greatly magnify the value of numerical climate model outputs and climate observations for future national and international climate-assessment reports. Continued ESGF progress will result in a production ultrascale data system for empowering scientists who attempt new and exciting data exchanges that could ultimately lead to breakthrough climate-science discoveries.