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Computational Technologies Project

ESMF Version 2.0 Introduced at 3rd ESMF Community Meeting

More than 100 scientists and model developers from around the world met at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on July 15 to take the next steps towards unifying the weather and climate prediction communities through a common underlying software system. The event was the 3rd Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) Community Meeting, where the main topics of discussion were the newly released ESMF Version 2.0 software and early field tests using this software in real models. ESMF is being developed by a national partnership led by NASA and including other government agencies and research universities.

ESMF allows researchers to easily assemble complex weather and climate models by representing the models (atmosphere, ocean, land, etc.) as collections of smaller components that are coupled together. With ESMF, researchers 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. Ideas can move quickly from scientist to code, from group to group, and from research to operations.

A preliminary version of an ESMF field test couples ocean and atmosphere models that had never interacted before. Sea surface temperature data moves from the MITgcm ocean model run at 2.8-degree resolution to the GFDL B-grid atmosphere model run at 2-degree resolution. The coupler software manages changes in resolution and re-gridding from latitude to longitude orientation (Image credit: Chris Hill, MIT).

The ESMF Version 2.0 release supports modeling applications composed of hierarchies and ensembles of components. It includes software for representing and manipulating components, states, fields, grids, and arrays, as well as utilities for time management, configuration, and logging. The ESMF software comes with an exhaustive reference manual, a user’s guide, more than 800 diagnostic tests, and more than 30 examples. It runs in Hewlett-Packard/Compaq, IBM, SGI, Apple Macintosh OS X, and a variety of Linux computing environments. As of this writing, Cray Inc. programmers are also running ESMF on the company’s X1 supercomputer.

The Community Meeting included descriptions of ESMF use at GSFC’s ESDCD, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), and Goddard Institute for Space Studies; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; NCAR; NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and National Centers for Environmental Prediction; and the Naval Research Laboratory-Monterey, which is among several Department of Defense entities that have joined the ESMF effort during the past year. Notably, the GMAO is building its next-generation GEOS-5 atmospheric general circulation model from scratch using ESMF and recently ran the first multi-year test simulation with it. ESMF collaborators also showed preliminary versions of three field tests that couple atmosphere and ocean models from different institutions in entirely new configurations, demonstrating the power of ESMF to forge new collaborations. These new models are still being checked and validated.

http://www.esmf.ucar.edu/
(choose “Downloads & Documentation”)

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