CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment accomplishments

Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) accomplishments

In FY2005, the Earth System Modeling Framework project completed its first round of NASA funding and demonstrated usage of the framework by an initial set of climate and weather codes, defined a technical vision and multi-agency organizational structure, and began implementation of its next phase. Follow-on funding was acquired through the Department of Defense, NASA, and NSF for a continued program of framework development and deployment (see Plans for ESMF and ESMF-based initiatives).

The ESMF, which consists of software infrastructure for constructing and combining model components, is in the process of being evaluated and adopted by an increasing number of national and international models, including the NOAA/NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS), Navy, Air Force, and Army models, the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), MITgcm, UCLA models, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model, and others. The NASA GEOS-5 atmospheric GCM, which was developed using ESMF from the start and utilizes many parts of the framework, was released and began operation during summer 2005. The figure below outlines its architecture.

The structure of the new atmospheric GCM at the NASA Goddard Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, which has been developed from the ground up using the Earth System Modeling Framework. Each box is an ESMF component. Every component has a standard interface so that it is swappable. New components can easily be added to the hierarchical system. Coupling tools include regridding and redistribution methods.

In FY2005, the ESMF project also completed a set of "interoperability experiments" that demonstrated new, inter-agency couplings of Earth system model components enabled by the ESMF software. The following figure shows an example of such a coupling performed with the UCLA AGCM and the Los Alamos POP and MITgcm ocean models.

Model comparison performed using the Earth System Modeling Framework: the POP ocean and the MITgcm ocean were coupled in turn to the UCLA atmospheric GCM. Figure courtesy of Roberto Mechoso, UCLA.

More information about ESMF is provided at the ESMF website.