CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment accomplishments

Earth System Curator accomplishments

FY2005 marked the start of the Earth System Curator project. The Earth System Curator is an NSF-sponsored research project that extends the work of the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), the Earth System Grid (ESG), GO-ESSP, and other community efforts to develop infrastructure and standards for climate and weather models and datasets. Partners include NOAA GFDL and PMEL, the Georgia Institute of Technology, ESG, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, the Community Climate System Model, and MIT.

Curator explores the possibilities opened up by the observation that the metadata descriptors used for comprehensively specifying a model configuration are needed for a scientifically useful description of the model output data as well. The Curator will provide a community database, built using these common metadata, from which researchers can archive and query a wide class of Earth system models, experiments, model components, and model output data and results. Researchers will subsequently be able to either analyze model output from pre-existing runs, or access a model and modify and run it themselves, either on a local computer or on the virtualized resources of the computational Grid.

In addition to the query function, the Curator will include a tool that tests if sets of model components or datasets can viably interact to form an application, and a tool that can autogenerate simple couplings.

During FY2005, a prototype Curator database was developed by GFDL, and initial discussions of its nature, structure, and evolution were initiated with Curator partners.