Collaborative Research: Earth System Curator: Spanning the Gap Between Models and Datasets

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The Earth System Curator collaboration will unify the treatment of models and datasets relating to climate change by developing a common language - a metadata formalism - with which to describe the two, and by prototyping a set of tools based on that formalism that allows researchers to manipulate models and datasets seamlessly and with ease. The goal, in the end, is to increase the productivity of climate researchers and understanding of the Earth system.Collaborators include computer science and Earth science researchers at MIT, Princeton University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The work proposed builds on two ongoing community efforts, the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) and the Earth System Grid II (ESG). The ESMF is a national initiative to develop common modeling infrastructure for the nation's climate and weather models, including coupling tools and standard modeling utilities. The primary objective of ESG is to make the output of high-resolution, long-duration simulations performed with climate models available to global change impacts researchers nationwide, through the use of Grid, data/metadata, and portal technologies. The team will explore those aspects of ESMF and ESG that can be usefully aligned, and will prototype a new entity, the Earth System Curator, that spans the gap between the two.The Curator begins with a crucial insight: that the descriptors used for comprehensively specifying a model configuration are needed for a scientifically useful description of the model output data as well. The development of a common metadata schema that describes both will be the basis for this unique and powerful community resource. The Curator will provide a community database from which researchers can archive and query a wide class of Earth system models, experiments, model components, and model output data and results. Researchers will subsequently be able either to analyze model output from pre-existing runs, or to access a model and modify and run it themselves, either on a local computer or on the virtualized resources of the computational Grid. In addition to the query function, the project will prototype a tool that will test if sets of model components or datasets can interact to form an application. Finally, as part of the Curator effort, tools for auto-generation of component wrappers and applications will also be prototyped.The Curator is part of a community vision for the use of information technology in climate and related research. The Curator prototype will help to further suggest and define the form of next-generation modeling and data management tools, by offering a concrete representation to add credibility to innovative ideas. Further, the ESMF and ESG co-investigators, by virtue of their projects' emphases on production software and extensive customer bases, are in an excellent position to transition the Curator tools into a viable product following an NSF-funded prototype stage. Over the course of the Curator effort, many researchers associated with ESMF and ESG will be encouraged to try out and offer feedback on the Curator software. Advances achieved with the Curator project will influence other domains through conferences and publications, and through a web of relationships founded on a shared need for multi-component HPC modeling, ease of information archival and access, and similarities in simulation numerics. While the advances in climate prediction due directly to the Curator effort itself may be both difficult to track and modest, an integrated environment for Earth system research is critical to addressing world climate issues in the near future, and the Curator is a definitive step in that direction. The Curator will also be incorporated into the project infrastructure for software engineering courses at Georgia Tech. Appropriate introductory material will be prepared and project opportunities defined. Many of the project opportunities will take the form of making climate data accessible to the general public. In this way the Curator not only provides software engineering students an opportunity to participate in an actual ongoing engineering development effort, but the resultant projects will make Earth science more available to the general public.