CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment plans

Plans for ESMF and ESMF-based initiatives

The next phase of ESMF development is being defined by a set of newly funded major initiatives that build on and extend the ESMF software to create interoperable modeling environments within particular domains. These ESMF-based initiatives include the Battlespace Environments Institute (BEI), a DoD-wide effort to develop integrated forecasts; the NASA Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction (MAP) Program, which focuses on climate and chemistry; the NOAA/NASA Integrated Dynamics through Earth's Atmosphere initiative (IDEA), which extends the NOAA Global Forecast System to include upper atmospheric processes; and a pilot project to integrate ESMF with the Space Weather Modeling Framework (SWMF).

Another initiative funded in FY2005 based on ESMF is the Curator database, which combines ESMF components with data services from the Earth System Grid (ESG). The Curator will serve as a foundation for tools that possess semantic information, and can archive and manipulate both models and data. It is an important step toward the implementation of an Earth System Knowledge Environment that offers integrated services to facilitate scientific workflows.

Development of ESMF itself will continue to support the additional requirements imposed by new ESMF-based initiatives. During FY2006, the ESMF team anticipates revising its central data structures for additional flexibility, adding support for grids with general curvilinear coordinates, unstructured grids, 3D grids, and observational data streams, adding a robust netCDF-based I/O capability, and supporting the reading and writing of interpolation weights and grid specifications.