CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment plans

Earth System Grid (ESG) plans

Currently, funding for the Earth System Grid is poised to terminate in July 2006 after a three-year initial term and a two-year renewal period. The ESG team is in the process of formulating plans for either securing additional funding sources to maintain the current infrastructure, and/or submitting new proposals for researching, developing, and deploying new expanded data services to benefit the climate modeling community.

In the few months that are left in the current funding period, emphasis will be placed on finalizing the reliability, scalability, and performance of the current system, as well as on making more data available to the community. Additionally, the following technical tasks will be undertaken and brought to conclusion:

• Complete integration of the LANL site into the ESG system, then initiate distribution of LANL ocean model data.

• Improve functionality for browsing and querying the ESG metadata database, with particular emphasis on data selection by variable content.

• Enable direct OPeNDAP access to the ESG data holdings via visualization analysis packages like CDAT and NCL, which are routinely used by scientists and researchers to analyze climate model data. Define and implement an interoperability protocol between such clients and the ESG Access Control system.