Earth System Curator and Model Metadata Discovery and Display for CMIP5 Sylvia Murphy and Cecelia Deluca (NOAA/CIRES) Hannah Wilcox (NCAR/CISL) Metafor Dissemination Meeting, Abingdon UK March 14, 2011

Outline Background (CIM within ESG): – What is Curator? – What is the Earth System Grid (ESG)? – Metadata and the Curator Project – Trackback display features Background (CIM within ESMF): – The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) – How ESMF is implementing the CIM Live Demonstration of CMIP5 model metadata in ESG

What is Curator? The Curator project collaboratively develops software infrastructure to support end-to-end modeling in the Earth sciences. – Span the gaps between modeling and data services. – Use metadata to internally document models. – Automate routine processes with workflow software. – Develop software infrastructure that can facilitate the governance of community software projects within the Earth sciences. One important focus is preparing for CMIP5. Curator’s role in CMIP5 is to serve as a liaison between METAFOR and the Earth System Grid (ESG) and to implement the display of CMIP5 metadata in the ESG Gateway.

CMIP5 Metadata and Curator Making sense of CMIP5 data in the quantity expected requires a significant improvement the metadata associated with the data. – Metadata about the fields and units within the files. – Metadata about the grids associated with the fields. – Metadata about the models that generated the data. This involves many groups across the U.S. and internationally – ESG, Curator, the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), the DOE Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), METAFOR, and others.

What is the Earth System Grid (ESG)? The Earth System Grid (ESG) integrates supercomputers with large- scale data and analysis servers located at numerous national labs and research centers to create a powerful system of federated Data Gateways. Goals – Make data more useful for researchers and policy makers. – Meet the needs of international climate projects for distributed databases, data access and data movement. – Provide a universal, Web-based data access portal for multi-model, observational, and reanalysis data collections. – Provide a wide range of climate data-analysis tools and diagnostic methods to international and U.S. climate centers. The Earth System Grid - Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) program. Content courtesy of Dean Williams (PCMDI) and Don Middleton (NCAR) from the ESG website and Cyberinfrastructure and the Global Environmental Data Challenge", Feb 2011, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh

ESG’s Federated Architecture Image courtesy of Luca Cinquini (NASA) and used with the permission of Don Middleton (NCAR) from Cyberinfrastructure and the Global Environmental Data Challenge", Feb 2011, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh

Display Features: Tabs and Component Trees

Display Features: Pop-up Definitions

The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) The ESMF is high-performance software infrastructure for building weather, climate, and related models. It enables models to be organized as sets of components representing physical domains and processes, such as atmospheres, oceans, and land masses. The components can be reused in different contexts and shared by multiple research and operational centers. ESMF also provides toolkits for common modeling functions, so modelers don't need to develop those utilities independently. One of these utilities is an Attribute Class that can be used to make models self-describing. ESMF is used in the U.S. in both operational and research models.

An Example of an ESMF Application NASA’s GEOS-5 Atmospheric General Circulation Model is built from the ground up using ESMF. – Each of the boxes is an ESMF component, including the couplers. – The hierarchical tree of components can be "snipped" at different levels so that the whole physics package could be replaced, or a single parameterization.

ESMF and the CIM ESMF is implementing the CIM as a series of nestable Attribute Packages that can then be exported at model initialization as a CIM XML. This work is ongoing, but as of ESMF release 5.2.0, which was released in Feb 2011, ESMF supports: – General component description – Responsible parties – ISO citations – Platform descriptions – Couplings/Inputs – Field descriptions These features are currently being implemented into a version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM).

Resources PCMDI: ESG: Earth System Curator: ESMF: