Steve Lowder from the Naval Research Laboratory addresses participants
at the Third ESMF Community Meeting.
Scientists and model developers learn about the newly released ESMF
version 2.0.
ESMF core implementation team manager Cecelia DeLuca, front, and
attendees at the community meeting hear about an early field test of
the latest ESMF software.
Shep Smithline from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
discusses ESMF capabilities.
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NCAR and SCD hosted more than
one hundred scientists and model developers from around the world at
the Third Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) Community Meeting,
held at NCAR's Mesa Laboratory in Boulder on 15 July 2004.
ESMF is a system for building structured weather and climate models
that is being developed by a national partnership that includes NCAR
plus:
- The National Science Foundation
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical
Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA GFDL)
- The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)
- NASA Goddard
- NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
- Argonne National Laboratory (Department of Energy)
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (Department of Energy)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
At the meeting, participants discussed the recent release of a new
version of the framework, ESMF Version 2.0, and described how they
had begun using the ESMF system. Presentations discussed development
using ESMF by immediate collaborators as well as by the Department
of Defense's Naval Research Laboratory and NASA's Goddard Institute
for Space Studies.
The community developing and using ESMF sees it as an opportunity
to unite the widespread climate and weather community through a base
of common software. ESMF is already showing promise in increasing the
interoperability of models and reducing the need to develop redundant
utilities.
ESMF's core implementation team is based in SCD, reflecting SCD's
leadership in blending computational and scientific expertise. Cecelia
DeLuca, a software engineer in SCD's Computational Science Section,
manages the implementation team.
Component-based software
The ESMF software is component-based, meaning that it allows researchers
to easily assemble complex models by representing the models as collections
of smaller components that are coupled together. Researchers using
ESMF have a standard way to add new capabilities and swap in different
options, making it much simpler for them to exchange codes with other
groups and institutions, and facilitating the free flow of ideas.
The ESMF Version 2.0 release includes software for representing and
manipulating components, states, fields, grids, and arrays, as well
as a number of utilities such as time management, configuration, and
logging. It runs on a wide variety of computing platforms, including
SGI, IBM, Compaq, and Linux variants.
For more information
Additional information on ESMF is on the Web at:
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