A framework for Earth system modeling

Cecelia DeLuca, a software engineer in SCD's Computational Science Section (CSS), is heading up a group of what will soon be six CSS software engineers working on the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF).

The ESMF team, which consists of researchers and computational experts from major U.S. Earth modeling centers, is developing a set of software tools to enhance ease of use, portability, interoperability, and reuse in climate, numerical weather prediction, and data assimilation applications.

The need for a software infrastructure for Earth system modeling has grown as models and computational platforms have become more complex, leading to excessive time and resources dedicated to solving computational rather than scientific problems.

The ESMF will allow diverse scientific groups to leverage common software to solve routine computational problems. It will provide an interface specification so that groups working at different institutions and in different disciplines can generate interoperable software components.

A true community collaboration, the project is unique in a number of ways, Cecelia says. It's bringing together the national modeling community in a way that hasn't been done before. Participants are developing software to facilitate greater collaboration between groups and remove technical barriers to creating new, multicomponent applications.

"Hopefully, what this will do is greatly reduce the amount of effort it takes to develop new applications by providing a standard set of software tools that are appropriate for these applications," Cecelia says -- for instance, tools for efficient coupling and I/O and common utilities such as time management, parameter specification, querying, logging, and profiling.

NCAR's Climate and Global Dynamics Division and the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division are also participating in the project; the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) and the Weather Research and Forecast Model (WRF) are testbeds for the ESMF.

Other participating institutions are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center, Princeton's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the University of Michigan, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory.

The ESMF project is funded by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office Computational Technologies Project.

Photo: Lynda Lester/SCD