ESGF_Overview

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ESGF Overview

The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a spontaneous collaboration of groups, agencies and institutions around the world, that are dedicated to the development and operation of a long-term system for the management, access and analysis of climate data. Some of the challenges that ESGF is committed to address include:

• The enormous scale of the data holdings, moving from Peta-bytes to Exa-bytes.
• Support for both model output and a wide variety of observational data
• The distributed nature of the data archives, which are geographically distributed and autonomously operated
• The need to enable users to access and analyze data with a wide variety of client tools - not just web browsers, but also rich desktop clients, libraries and toolkits
• The need to harmonize and federate multiple local access policies

The ESGF architecture is based on a system of autonomous and distributed Nodes, which interoperate through common acceptance of federation protocols and trust agreements. Data is stored at multiple Nodes, and served through local data and metadata services. Nodes exchange information about their data holdings and services, trust each other for registering users and establishing access control decisions. The net result is that a user can use a web browser or rich desktop client, connect to any Node, and seamlessly find and access data throughout the federation. (see ESGF Architecture for more details.)

At each Node, the ESGF software stack is the result of the integration of multiple applications and servers, either developed by some of the ESGF partners, or freely available from the community.

The ESGF Collaboration

• United Stated:
  • ANL (Argonne National Laboratory)
  • LBNL
  • LLNL/PCMDI
  • NASA/JPL
  • NCAR
  • ORNL
• Europe:
  • BADC (British Atmospheric Data Center)
  • CMCC (Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici)
  • DKRZ
  • IPSL (Institut Pierre Simon Laplace)

The ESGF Sponsors

ESGF is not a directly funded organization. The current core contributors to the project work for various agencies around the world, including:

• U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
• U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)