The Earth System Curator
The Earth System Curator project is creating a software environment
for assembling, running, and archiving information about climate models.
The intent is to make it easier for scientists to perform modeling
experiments and to coordinate with each other on efforts such as
Model Intercomparison Projects and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) assessments. The Curator project will enable groups to
prepare data for submission to the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis
and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for IPCC analysis. Curator partners include
NCAR (the Earth System Grid and Earth System Modeling Framework projects),
the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, MIT, and the Georgia Institute
of Technology.
One of the first goals of the Curator project is to help supplement and refine metadata schemata such as the Numerical Model Metadata (NMM) conventions so that they better serve model analysis projects, and so that they are complete and precise enough to serve as the foundation for software tools that can automate workflow tasks. The Curator team will define an extended schema that utilizes CF and NMM conventions.
The Curator itself will be a distributed environment, based on this extended schema, that allows modelers to:
- Archive and query models, experiments, model components, and model output
- Test the technical compatibility of model components
- Assemble and run multi-component models
The proposed Curator architecture includes:
A central CDP-Curator Portal that provides access to Earth system model component software, output datasets, and metadata describing these. The CDP-Curator portal will utilize the Community Data Portal (CDP) developed at NCAR.
Satellite sites that can assemble and run models, and archive experiments and data. The prototype for the Curator satellite site is the Flexible Modeling System Run-time Environment (FRE) and associated database at GFDL.
A lightweight interface that enables model components to be described and archived by groups that don't have a Curator software installation. Provider sites will use a schema based on Curator extensions to NMM.
By creating a common modeling infrastructure that serves the climate domain, the Earth System Curator supports the NCAR strategic priority of "Developing community models for weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and solar-terrestrial research." It also fulfills NCAR's strategic priority of "Creating an Earth system knowledge environment" by serving as a key element of this effort to integrate the suite of scientific software at NCAR and improve the support of science workflows.
During FY2007, the Curator team continued to develop metadata standards in concert with a broad set of U.S. and European collaborators, focusing on techniques for combining multiple schemata into specific use profiles. Curator staff applied the schema to three interacting components of the GEOS-5 atmospheric GCM as a test case. These components were then used to define the requirements and prototype a component compatibility check capability. Use cases, schemata, and other materials are available on the Earth System Curator website.
In FY2008 the ESMF team will continue to work on schema development, focusing on the capabilities needed for compatibility check and auto-generation, and will complete a prototype of the end-to-end system.
Earth System Curator is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation Science Engineering Information Integration and Informatics program.