Earth System Grid

Earth System Grid
Name	Earth System Grid
Type	International data infrastructure
Headquarters	National Center for Atmospheric Research
Established	2001

Contents

Earth System Grid

The Earth System Grid is an international data distribution infrastructure designed to serve large-scale climate and Earth system simulation outputs from projects such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and national modeling centers like the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. It provides curated datasets, metadata catalogs, and access services that support research by institutions including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the United Kingdom Met Office. The project interoperates with repositories and standards bodies such as the World Data System, the Open Geospatial Consortium, and the Research Data Alliance.

Overview

The Earth System Grid aggregates multi-petabyte archives of model output from consortia like the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison and experimental initiatives tied to programs at the U.S. Department of Energy and the European Commission. It coordinates storage and distribution architectures used by facilities such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to facilitate access by scientists affiliated with universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford and agencies including the National Science Foundation. The platform emphasizes metadata standards promoted by the World Meteorological Organization and data citation practices endorsed by the International Science Council.

The Grid’s architecture combines distributed storage arrays at centers such as Argonne National Laboratory and indexing/catalog services used by the Earth Science Information Partners community. Key components include data nodes that implement protocols from the Open Archives Initiative and the Open Geospatial Consortium, portal services developed in collaboration with teams at Princeton University and Columbia University, and authentication/authorization middleware interoperable with federations like InCommon. Workflow orchestration integrates computation backends found at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and NERSC while preserving provenance models from the PROV Data Model Working Group and persistent identifier schemes recommended by DataCite.

The Grid hosts outputs from experiments aligned with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 and later phases, observational synthesis products from missions run by National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and reanalysis datasets produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Services include metadata harvesting compatible with the Dublin Core-style profiles adopted by the World Data System, high-performance network distribution via research backbones like Internet2 and GÉANT, and climate data subsetting and analysis tools developed with partners including NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The Grid supports user authentication using credentials from identity providers such as Google for federated login where institutional agreements permit.

Primary users span investigators from centers like Scripps Institution of Oceanography, policymakers informed by assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and educators at institutions including University of California, Berkeley. Application domains include detection and attribution studies by teams at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, impact assessments produced for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change-related processes, and toolchains for integrated assessment modeling used by consortia such as the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium. The Grid also underpins downstream services in private sector analytics undertaken by firms collaborating with agencies like NOAA and research collaborations with the European Commission.

Initiated in the early 2000s with contributions from agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy and institutions such as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the infrastructure evolved through successive cooperative projects involving National Center for Atmospheric Research and national laboratories like Los Alamos National Laboratory. Major milestones include adaptation for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 outputs, scaling efforts coordinated with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and adoption of standards advocated by the World Data System. The program’s development was influenced by parallel initiatives such as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and early e-science projects funded by the European Research Council.

Governance arrangements have involved steering committees with representatives from agencies such as the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and research centers like National Center for Atmospheric Research. Funding streams have combined grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, project support under frameworks of the European Commission, and contributions from national laboratories including Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Collaborative oversight has engaged standard-setting organizations like the Open Geospatial Consortium and coordination with data stewardship initiatives championed by the World Data System.

Category:Climate data infrastructure