Outline

The Impact of the Earth System Curator Project on the CMIP5 Model Metadata

Discovery and Display

Sylvia Murphy and Cecelia Deluca (NOAA/CIRES)

September 26, 2011

Outline

• Background (CIM within ESG):– What is Curator?– What is CMIP5?– What is the Earth System Grid (ESG)?– What is METAFOR?– Model metadata display features

• Background (CIM within ESMF):– The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF)– How ESMF is implementing the CIM– Impacts of ESMF/Curator metadata on CESM

• Live Demonstration of CMIP5 model metadata in ESG

What is Curator?

• The Curator project collaboratively develops software infrastructure to support end-to-end modeling in the Earth sciences.– Funded initially by NSF in 2005– Now supported by NASA, NOAA GIP, and NSF CDI and TeraGrid funds

• Curator collaborates with many groups across the U.S. and internationally – ESG, the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), the DOE Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), METAFOR, and many others.

• Project Objectives:– Span the gaps between modeling and data services.– Use metadata to document models.– Automate routine processes with workflow software.– Develop software infrastructure that can facilitate the governance of

community software projects within the Earth sciences.• Curator Software is collaboratively developed, community vetted, standards

based and is creating capabilities that not only facilitate science but extend it.

What is CMIP5?

• The 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) is meant to provide a framework for coordinated climate change experiments for the next five years and thus includes simulations for assessment in the IPCC sponsored AR5 as well as others that extend beyond the AR5.

• CMIP5 promotes a standard set of model simulations in order to: – evaluate how realistic the models are in simulating the recent past,– provide projections of future climate change on two time scales, near

term (out to about 2035) and long term (out to 2100 and beyond), and – understand some of the factors responsible for differences in model

projections, including quantifying some key feedbacks such as those involving clouds and the carbon cycle

Information courtesy of the CMIP5 website at PCMDI: http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/

Curator’s role in CMIP5 is to serve as a liaison between METAFOR and the Earth System Grid (ESG) and to implement the display of CMIP5 metadata in the ESG Gateway.

Impact on CMIP5: Centers

Primary Group Country

NOAA GFDL USA

NASA GSFC USA

NASA GISS USA

NCAR USA

NERSC, Hadley Center, IPSL, LMD, MPI, INGV, EC-Earth Consortium, CERFACS, CNRM, University of Reading

Europe

NIES, University of Tokyo, MRI, METRI, LASG IAP, BCC Asia

CCMA Canada

CSIRO, BMRC, QCCE Australia

INM Russia

The following domestic and international centers will be using Curator metadata software to view, analyze and compare their CMIP5 metadata.

Content courtesy of Karl Taylor: Overview and Plans for CMIP5 Presented at the APWF and ABD Joint International Workshop, Manila Philippines, 24 March 2010

Impact of CMIP5: Data

• 20 modeling centers• 60 Experiments• Covers 90,000 years • Each using several • model configurations• Producing 2 million

output “atomic”• datasets • Resulting in 10's of

petabytes of output

Curator software will be connecting each of these data sets to a description of the simulation that created it.

Example experimental design courtesy of Karl Taylor: Overview and Plans for CMIP5 Presented at the APWF and ABD Joint International Workshop, Manila Philippines, 24 March 2010

What is the Earth System Grid (ESG)?

• The Earth System Grid (ESG) is a network of nodes for federated data access and related services that supports research on Earth’s climate and its impacts.

• Goals– Make data more useful for researchers and policy makers.– Meet the needs of international climate projects for distributed databases,

data access and data movement.– Provide a universal, Web-based data access portal for multi-model,

observational, and reanalysis data collections.– Provide a wide range of climate data-analysis tools and diagnostic methods

to international and U.S. climate centers.• The Earth System Grid - Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) is funded

by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) program.

Content courtesy of Dean Williams (PCMDI) and Don Middleton (NCAR) from the ESG website and “Cyberinfrastructure and the Global Environmental Data Challenge", Feb 2011, e-Science Institute, Edinburgh

Curator is collaborating closely with this domestic partner to implement metadata services within the Earth System Grid.

Impact on the Federated ESG

Image courtesy of Luca Cinquini (NASA/NOAA) and used with the permission of Don Middleton (NCAR) from “Cyberinfrastructure and the Global Environmental Data Challenge", Feb 2011, e-Science Institute,

Edinburgh

Curator metadata software is being installed at all ESG Gateways

What is METAFOR?

• An European Union funded project• Participants primarily from the UK, France, and Germany • Tasked by the World Climate Research Program to develop metadata for

CMIP5• Collaboratively producing the Common Information Model or CIM, which is

is being used for CMIP5 and which is becoming the community standard for the description of Earth system models.

• Created an online CMIP5 questionnaire that modeling centers are filling out.

Curator is collaborating with METAFOR to develop the CIM standard, to display the CMIP5 metadata, and take metadata services into the future. Curator also serves as a liaison between METAFOR and ESG.

Display Features: Tabs and Component Trees

Curator display in ESG showing metadata from

a CMIP5 run.

Display Features: Pop-up Definitions

The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF)

• ESMF is high-performance software infrastructure that is used by a broad spectrum of weather, climate, and related models. It enables models to be organized as sets of components representing physical domains and processes, such as atmospheres, oceans, and land masses.

• The components can be reused in different contexts and shared by multiple research and operational centers. ESMF also provides toolkits for common modeling functions, so modelers don't need to develop those utilities independently.

• One of these utilities is a Attribute Class that can be used to make models self-describing. It represents metadata as name-value pairs, organized in packages that reflect current community standards (ISO, Climate and Forecase, CIM).

Impact on the Community Earth System Model (CESM)

• ESMF and Curator are currently implementing into the Community Earth System Model (CESM) a full suite of metadata capabilities using the ESMF Attribute Class. It is using community standards as the basis of development.

• This work is ongoing, but as of ESMF release 5.2.0r, which was released in July 2011, ESMF supports:– General component description– Simulation properties– Responsible parties – ISO citations– Platform descriptions– Couplings/Inputs– Field descriptions– Custom attributes

• ESMF is implementing the metadata as a series of nestable Attribute Packages that can then be exported at model initialization as a METAFOR CIM XML.

CESM metadata to ESG display

• The XML file that CESM generates using ESMF can automatically be ingested into ESG since it is in the same standardized format as the metadata generated by the CMIP5 questionnaire.• The advantage of having

the model generate metadata is that it can be generated and customized more easily.• Example output at right

Screenshot

Future Work

• Finalize display of CMIP5 model metadata• Explore more sustainable technologies for the CIM-to-display conversion• Leverage Curator metadata capabilities in other projects

(e.g. a shared data analysis and visualization workspace, the National Climate Prediction and Projections Platform, a dynamical core workshop)

• Explore a joint implementation of the CIM portal and Curator trackback interface in future versions of ESG

Live Demo of Curator Display in ESG

View at: http://www.earthsystemgrid.org/home.htm

Questions?

Earth System Curator: http://curator.ucar.edu

ESG: http://earthsystemgrid.org/PCMDI: http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/

ESMF: http://www.earthsystemmodeling.org/

[email protected]