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Distributed Resources for the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Advanced Management (DREAM). Final Report

Distributed Resources for the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Advanced Management (DREAM) is a proposed system that will enable data from an infinite number of diverse sources to be organized and accessed from anywhere using any handheld or other computer device. The approach offers a powerful roadmap for the creation and integration of a unified knowledge base of an entire ecosystem, including its many geophysical, geographical, social, political, agricultural, energy, transportation, and cyber aspects. The resulting aggregation of data has the potential to generate an informational universe of unprecedented size that has never before been possible due to the prohibitive costs, managerial complexity, and technical barriers associated with ever-changing exponential-growth data flows. We envision that DREAM will accelerate discovery by enabling climate researchers, among other types of researchers, to manage, analyze, and visualize data from earth-scale measurements and simulations. DREAM’s success will be built on proven components that leverage existing services and resources. A key building block for DREAM will be the ESGF, chaired by Dean N. Williams. Expanding on the existing ESGF, the project will ensure that the access, storage, movement, and analysis of the large quantities of data that are processed and produced by diverse science projects can be dynamically distributed with proper resource management. Much of the Office of Science data is currently generated by multiple stand-alone facilities. DREAM can collect data accumulated from these facilities and incorporate it into a fully integrated network accessible from anywhere in the world. The result is a completely new paradigm shift for data management, analysis, and visualization enabling researchers to: Manage their calculations, data, tools, and research results; Ensure that all data are sharable, reproducible and (re)usable—accompanied by appropriate metadata describing its provenance, syntax, and semantics at creation; Advance application performance by selectively adapting APIs and services in response to scientific requirements and architectural complexities; and Provide scalable interactive resource management—navigate data and metadata at multiple levels, provide architecture-aware data integration, analysis and visualization tools. We will engage closely with DOE, NASA, and NOAA science groups working at the leading edge of computing. These engagements—in domains such as biology, climate, and hydrology—will allow us to advance disciplinary science goals and inform our development of technologies that can accelerate discovery across DOE more broadly. We will advertise and promote our technologies via dedicated workshops, tutorials, and sessions at conferences, stand-alone events with broad inter-disciplinary invitation, and engagements with leadership facilities.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Publishing Variables Archived at GES DISC to Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)

We present a straightforward and low-cost approach to publish variables archived at NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) to the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). An ESGF publication requires a single standard-name variable aggregated over time to facilitate data inter-comparison. It also contains significant metadata to enable searching in ESGF. We look up standard names on high demand in ESGF search history, and using OPeNDAP and NcML technologies we aggregate the corresponding variables available in the GES DISC archive with augmented metadata required by CMIP6 and obs4MIPs Data Specification version 2.1. At this writing 10 variables from a standard product of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder along with the Tech Notes are published in ESGF by NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS). Users can view, analyze, and subset remotely, and download these aggregated variables via links in any ESGF node after searching. We plan to work on and publish more variables and data from different NASA missions and experiments in our archive.

Fan Fang↗

The Earth System Grid Federation : an Open Infrastructure for Access to Distributed Geospatial Data

The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a multi-agency, international collaboration that aims at developing the software infrastructure needed to facilitate and empower the study of climate change on a global scale. The ESGF's architecture employs a system of geographically distributed peer nodes, which are independently administered yet united by the adoption of common federation protocols and application programming interfaces (APIs). The cornerstones of its interoperability are the peer-to-peer messaging that is continuously exchanged among all nodes in the federation; a shared architecture and API for search and discovery; and a security infrastructure based on industry standards (OpenID, SSL, GSI and SAML). The ESGF software is developed collaboratively across institutional boundaries and made available to the community as open source. It has now been adopted by multiple Earth science projects and allows access to petabytes of geophysical data, including the entire model output used for the next international assessment report on climate change (IPCC-AR5) and a suite of satellite observations (obs4MIPs) and reanalysis data sets (ANA4MIPs).

search,↗

ILAMBv2.7 benchmarking results comparing E3SMv2.1 land-atmosphere coupled (BGCv2LNDATM) and stand alone land (ELM) simulations with CMIP6 emission driven historical simulations

This dataset contains land model benchmarking results for the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2.1 (E3SMv2.1), including outputs from both coupled biogeochemistry simulations and stand-alone land model simulations. These results are compared against several emission-driven historical simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). Benchmarking was conducted using the International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) package, version 2.7 (ILAMBv2.7). CMIP6 model outputs were sourced from the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), while the E3SMv2.1 results were derived from raw model outputs. These outputs underwent processing steps such as time serialization, conservative regridding, and data standardization to ensure comparability. For spatial interpolation, the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) tool, ESMF_RegridWeightGen, was employed to generate regridding weights, enabling the transformation of E3SM’s native cubed-sphere grid to a regular latitude-longitude grid.

Feng, Sha [PNNL]↗

A Global Repository for Planet-Sized Experiments and Observations

Working across U.S. federal agencies, international agencies, and multiple worldwide data centers, and spanning seven international network organizations, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) allows users to access, analyze, and visualize data using a globally federated collection of networks, computers, and software. Its architecture employs a system of geographically distributed peer nodes that are independently administered yet united by common federation protocols and application programming interfaces (APIs). The full ESGF infrastructure has now been adopted by multiple Earth science projects and allows access to petabytes of geophysical data, including the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) output used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. Data served by ESGF not only include model output (i.e., CMIP simulation runs) but also include observational data from satellites and instruments, reanalyses, and generated images. Metadata summarize basic information about the data for fast and easy data discovery.

Earth Systems Grid Federation (ESGFC)↗

Distributed Resources for the Earth System Grid Advanced Management (DREAM). Final Report

The DREAM project was funded more than 3 years ago to design and implement a next generation ESGF (Earth System Grid Federation) architecture which would be suitable for managing and accessing data and services resources on a distributed and scalable environment. In particular, the project intended to focus on the computing and visualization capabilities of the stack, which at the time were rather primitive. At the beginning, the team had the general notion that a better ESGF architecture could be built by modularizing each component, and redefining its interaction with other components by defining and exposing a well defined API. Although this was still the high level principle that guided the work, the DREAM project was able to accomplish its goals by leveraging new practices in IT that started just about 3 or 4 years ago: the advent of containerization technologies (specifically, Docker), the development of frameworks to manage containers at scale (Docker Swarm and Kubernetes), and their application to the commercial Cloud. Thanks to these new technologies, DREAM was able to improve the ESGF architecture (including its computing and visualization services) to a level of deployability and scalability beyond the original expectations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Rapid Evaluation Framework for the CMIP7 Assessment Fast Track

As Earth system models (ESMs) grow in complexity and in volume of output data, there is an increasing need for rapid, comprehensive evaluation of their scientific performance. The upcoming Assessment Fast Track for the Seventh Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7) will require expeditious response for model analyses designed to inform and drive integrated Earth system assessments. To meet this challenge, the Rapid Evaluation Framework (REF), a community-driven platform for benchmarking and performance assessment of ESMs, was designed and developed. The initial implementation of the REF, constructed to meet the near-term needs of the CMIP7 Assessment Fast Track, builds upon four disparate community evaluation and benchmarking tools that are coupled together using the Coordinated Model Evaluation Capabilities (CMEC) framework. The REF runs within a containerized workflow for portability and reproducibility and is aimed at generating and organizing diagnostics covering a variety of model variables. The REF leverages well documented observational datasets to provide assessments of model fidelity across a collection of diagnostics. All diagnostics were identified and selected with community involvement and consultation. Operational integration with the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) will permit automated execution of the REF for selected diagnostics as soon as model output data are published on ESGF by the originating modeling centers. The REF is designed to be portable across a range of current computational platforms to facilitate use by modeling centers for assessing the evolution of model versions or gauging the relative performance of CMIP simulations before being published on ESGF. When integrated into production simulation workflows, results from the REF provide immediate quantitative feedback that allows model developers and scientists to quickly identify model biases and performance issues. After the REF is released to the community, its subsequent development and support will be prioritized by an international consortium of scientists and engineers, enabling a broader impact across Earth science disciplines. For instance, the REF will facilitate improvements to models and will enhance confidence in model projections through process-based selection of models based on their performance with respect to observations. Production of reproducible diagnostics and community-based assessments are key features of the REF. Furthermore, providing interoperability with existing evaluation packages assures that contributions from previous community efforts will be available for use in future model intercomparison projects.

Hoffman, Forrest [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000158024134)↗

Observations for Model Intercomparison Project (Obs4MIPs): status for CMIP6

The Observations for Model Intercomparison Project (Obs4MIPs) was initiated in 2010 to facilitate the use of observations in climate model evaluation and research, with a particular target being the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a major initiative of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). To this end, Obs4MIPs (1) targets observed variables that can be compared to CMIP model variables; (2) utilizes dataset formatting specifications and metadata requirements closely aligned with CMIP model output; (3) provides brief technical documentation for each dataset, designed for nonexperts and tailored towards relevance for model evaluation, including information on uncertainty, dataset merits, and limitations; and (4) disseminates the data through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) platforms, making the observations searchable and accessible via the same portals as the model output. Taken together, these characteristics of the organization and structure of obs4MIPs should entice a more diverse community of researchers to engage in the comparison of model output with observations and to contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation of the climate models. At present, the number of obs4MIPs datasets has grown to about 80; many are undergoing updates, with another 20 or so in preparation, and more than 100 are proposed and under consideration. A partial list of current global satellite-based datasets includes humidity and temperature profiles; a wide range of cloud and aerosol observations; ocean surface wind, temperature, height, and sea ice fraction; surface and top-of-atmosphere longwave and shortwave radiation; and ozone (O 3 ), methane (CH 4 ), and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) products. A partial list of proposed products expected to be useful in analyzing CMIP6 results includes the following: alternative products for the above quantities, additional products for ocean surface flux and chlorophyll products, a number of vegetation products (e.g., FAPAR, LAI, burned area fraction), ice sheet mass and height, carbon monoxide (CO), and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ). While most existing obs4MIPs datasets consist of monthly-mean gridded data over the global domain, products with higher time resolution (e.g., daily) and/or regional products are now receiving more attention. Along with an increasing number of datasets, obs4MIPs has implemented a number of capability upgrades including (1) an updated obs4MIPs data specifications document that provides additional search facets and generally improves congruence with CMIP6 specifications for model datasets, (2) a set of six easily understood indicators that help guide users as to a dataset's maturity and suitability for application, and (3) an option to supply supplemental information about a dataset beyond what can be found in the standard metadata. With the maturation of the obs4MIPs framework, the dataset inclusion process, and the dataset formatting guidelines and resources, the scope of the observations being considered is expected to grow to include gridded in situ datasets as well as datasets with a regional focus, and the ultimate intent is to judiciously expand this scope to any observation dataset that has applicability for evaluation of the types of Earth system models used in CMIP.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Towards provision of regularly updated climate data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is a flagship of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). CMIP has become a recognised ‘brand’ in climate circles evolving over the last thirty years from a targeted research activity by a small number of climate modelling centres intercomparing their Earth System Model (ESM) simulations to a broad international coordinated research effort (Durack et al, 2025). CMIP is organized as a research activity leveraging funded and in-kind contributions from experts within modelling centres and the broader scientific community supported more recently by a fully-funded International Project Office. Within CMIP, Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) are community-designed to understand past, present and future climate. CMIP data provides a valuable resource for climate research and is routinely used to assess model representation of climate processes and test scientific hypotheses in the context of model uncertainty and (forced and internal) variability as evident from its prolific use in scientific publications1 . The impact relies on enabling infrastructure (most prominently via the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)), which allows sharing of simulation output, provision of the boundary conditions used in each simulation, and definition of the data standards that are essential to facilitating wide use of the data. The impact is supplemented by the wide-ranging scrutiny to which model simulations are subjected. Beyond its use in research, CMIP data is a key resource for communities producing derived climate information from downscaling and impact studies, such as the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX; Gutowski et al., 2016) and the Intersectoral Impacts MIP (ISIMIP; Frieler et al., 2024). Government, academic and commercial entities also increasingly rely on CMIP and its downstream data for climate risk assessments and climate services (for example, Copernicus Climate Change Service and World Bank portal). This means that, although CMIP is a research activity, it increasingly serves a secondary and very relevant role as a provider of climate data – a long-recognised dichotomy (Stevens, 2024). Research and applications have distinct needs, with the former requiring flexibility and generality and the latter consistency. Here we explain how the design of the research activity has been adapted to reduce the burdens imposed by applications and how the research infrastructure might evolve to further enable scientific inquiry. We propose one possible approach to consistently providing model information and projections for applications in the future.

Environmental sciences↗

Climate Change Projection in the Twenty-First Century Simulated by NIMS-KMA CMIP6 Model Based on New GHGs Concentration Pathways

Abstract The National Institute of Meteorological Sciences-Korea Meteorological Administration (NIMS-KMA) has participated in the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP) and provided long-term simulations using the coupled climate model. The NIMS-KMA produces new future projections using the ensemble mean of KMA Advanced Community Earth system model (K-ACE) and UK Earth System Model version1 (UKESM1) simulations to provide scientific information of future climate changes. In this study, we analyze four experiments those conducted following the new shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) based scenarios to examine projected climate change in the twenty-first century. Present day (PD) simulations show high performance skill in both climate mean and variability, which provide a reliability of the climate models and reduces the uncertainty in response to future forcing. In future projections, global temperature increases from 1.92 °C to 5.20 °C relative to the PD level (1995–2014). Global mean precipitation increases from 5.1% to 10.1% and sea ice extent decreases from 19% to 62% in the Arctic and from 18% to 54% in the Antarctic. In addition, climate changes are accelerating toward the late twenty-first century. Our CMIP6 simulations are released to the public through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) international data sharing portal and are used to support the establishment of the national adaptation plan for climate change in South Korea.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

The Worldwide C3S CORDEX Grand Ensemble: A Major Contribution to Assess Regional Climate Change in the IPCC AR6 Atlas

The collaboration between the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) and the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) provides open access to an unprecedented ensemble of regional climate model (RCM) simulations, across the 14 CORDEX continental-scale domains, with global coverage. These simulations have been used as a new line of evidence to assess regional climate projections in the latest contribution of the Working Group I (WGI) to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), particularly in the regional chapters and the Atlas. Here, we present the work done in the framework of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) to assemble a consistent worldwide CORDEX grand ensemble, aligned with the deadlines and activities of IPCC AR6. This work addressed the uneven and heterogeneous availability of CORDEX ESGF data by supporting publication in CORDEX domains with few archived simulations and performing quality control. It also addressed the lack of comprehensive documentation by compiling information from all contributing regional models, allowing for an informed use of data. In addition to presenting the worldwide CORDEX dataset, we assess here its consistency for precipitation and temperature by comparing climate change signals in regions with overlapping CORDEX domains, obtaining overall coincident regional climate change signals. The C3S CORDEX dataset has been used for the assessment of regional climate change in the IPCC AR6 (and for the interactive Atlas) and is available through the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS).

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Automated, reliable, and efficient continental-scale replication of 7.3 petabytes of computational simulation data: A case study

We report on our experiences replicating 7.3 petabytes (PB) of Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) computational simulation data from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California to Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in Illinois and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee—a task motivated by a need for increased reliability, capacity, and performance. This task presented significant challenges: the need to move 29 million files twice under time pressure from aging storage hardware; a source file system bottleneck limiting throughput to 1.5 GB/s; frequent site maintenance windows; and the need for complete reliability at scale. We addressed these challenges using a simple replication tool that invoked Globus to transfer large bundles of files while tracking progress in a database, dynamically rerouting transfers to work around maintenance periods and file system limitations. Under the covers, Globus organized transfers to make efficient use of the high-speed Energy Sciences network (ESnet) and the data transfer nodes deployed at participating sites, and also addressed security, integrity checking, and recovery from a variety of transient failures. This success demonstrates the considerable benefits that can accrue from the adoption of performant data replication infrastructure. The replication tool is available at https://github.com/esgf2-us/data-replication-tools.

Globus↗

Coordinating an operational data distribution network for CMIP6 data

The distribution of data contributed to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) is via the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). The ESGF is a network of internationally distributed sites that together work as a federated data archive. Data records from climate modelling institutes are published to the ESGF and then shared around the world. It is anticipated that CMIP6 will produce approximately 20 PB of data to be published and distributed via the ESGF. In addition to this large volume of data a number of value-added CMIP6 services are required to interact with the ESGF; for example the citation and errata services both interact with the ESGF but are not a core part of its infrastructure. With a number of interacting services and a large volume of data anticipated for CMIP6, the CMIP Data Node Operations Team (CDNOT) was formed. The CDNOT coordinated and implemented a series of CMIP6 preparation data challenges to test all the interacting components in the ESGF CMIP6 software ecosystem. This ensured that when CMIP6 data were released they could be reliably distributed.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

ESGF Future Architecture Report (V.1.1)

This document reports the findings of the Earth System Grid Federation Future Architecture Face-to-Face Meeting held in the UK 5-7 November 2019, attended by technical representatives from the ESGF partner organisations. ESGF is an International federated archive that provides access to Earth science data. It is fundamentally a distributed file management system with its main function being data dissemination through the provision of services for efficient replication and search. It has been in operation for over ten years and has undergone continuous improvements and enhancements over this time span. The Future Architecture is a major review of the software system including a fundamental reassessment of its requirements with a view to develop a new overall system architecture. This has been initiated in the light of challenges around the maintenance of the existing software legacy and a changing technology landscape and practices in the communities it serves. The work is being carried out under the oversight of the ESGF Executive Committee1,2 and is coordinated activity between ESGF and the European IS-ENES3 project.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Hosting downscaled decision-relevant community data products in ESGF2-US

As regionally-relevant high-resolution Earth system data is increasingly relied upon across scientific, policy, and practitioner communities, there is an urgent need for coordinated and federated infrastructure to store, manage, standardize, and distribute decision-relevant community data products. Substantial effort is required to ensure that these products, which are often critical for regional impact assessments and decision-making, are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The Earth System Grid Federation US project (ESGF2-US) is addressing this challenge by expanding its open-source, distributed platform to support the hosting and dissemination of downscaled Earth system datasets. This expansion includes aligning new downscaled datasets with developing community standards for metadata and file structure, consistent with existing ESGF archives. This includes ensuring CF-compliance, applying CMORization where appropriate, and developing tools to streamline user access. In this paper, we highlight the technical and coordination work required to bring downscaled data into ESGF2-US and aim to inform the broader Earth system data user community about the growing availability and utility of these curated resources.

ESGF↗