Earth System Curator

1. Earth System Curator Spanning the Gap Between Models and Datasets

2. Goal • The goal of the Earth System Curator project is provide a transparent interface to climate simulations and their data • To do this, there must be a common description, expressed as metadata • The starting point are several existing efforts: ESMF, ESG and the GFDL Curator database

3. Current Efforts • Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) • NSF, NCAR, DoD, NASA, NOAA, DoE, MIT, UCLA, University of Michigan • Earth System Grid (ESG) • DoE SciDAC sponsored • Labs: ANL, LBNL, LLNL, NCAR, ORNL • GFDL Curator database

4. Earth System Modeling Framework • Common modeling infrastructure for climate and weather models • Tools for turning models into components with standard interfaces • Ability to couple climate model components • Common data structures and utilities: • Data communications • Regridding • Time management • Message logging

5. ESMF Goals • Increase scientific productivity by making model components easier to build, combine, and exchange • Allow modelers to take advantage of high-end computers (Grid computing) • Promote new scientific opportunities and services through community building and increased interoperability of codes

6. ESMF Example Application

7. Example • Each box is an ESMF component • Components have standard interfaces so that they can easily interoperate • Data into and out of components are packaged as state types with user-definable fields • New components can be easily added to the hierarchical system • Special couplers component support regridding and data sharing

8. ESMF Data Logical Model

9. Earth System Grid • Make output of high-resolution, long-duration climate simulations available to global-change impacts researchers • Enable analysis and knowledge development from earth system models • Increase productivity by linking users with needed data

10. ESG Technologies • Grid computing • Portal technologies • OPeNDAP – remote data access • Globus Toolkit – authentication, resource discovery and access

11. Placeholder for ESG Logical Model

12. GFDL Curator

13. What is the Earth System Curator? • Future climate projections performed at many sites • Key goal of research is to reduce uncertainty of these projections by understanding differences in output from different models • This comparative study of climate simulations has spawned efforts to build uniform access to both output datasets and climate models

14. What is the Earth System Curator? • ESC begins with a crucial insight: the descriptors used for comprehensively specifying a model configuration are also needed for a scientifically useful description of the model output data • This leads to the convergence of models and data • There is a need for a common metadata formalism to unify the treatment of models and data

15. Research Approach • Study metadata structures of Earth System Modeling Framework (models) and Earth System Grid (data) • Create a common ontology that aligns the two metadata models, while also allowing for eventual inclusion of other metadata sources • The resulting metadata description will be the foundation of the Earth System Curator database

16. ESMF Ontology

17. GFDL Curator Ontolgy

18. Issues Raised and Outstanding

19. Vision (Prototype) • Balaji's scenarios

20. Curator Functions • Allow researchers to archive and query Earth system models, experiments, model components, and model output data • Run models locally or on computational Grid • Auto-generate component wrappers for model integration

21. Broader Impacts • Facilitate Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) by allowing fast setup and execution of experiments using different model components • Encourage Curator-like activity in other domains • Improve climate prediction for policy makers • Promote the use of Curator as a normative ontology

22. ESC Collaborators • NSF Funded • National Center for Atmospheric Research • NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory • MIT • Georgia Tech