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Earth System Grid Federation

An open source effort providing a robust, distributed data and computation platform, enabling world wide access to Peta/Exa-scale scientific data.

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Software Deprecation and Transition Announcement:

For the process of transitioning data nodes from the previous installation method using the esgf-ansble playbooks to the use of esgf-docker deployment, ESGF will officially deprecate the esgf-ansible installation playbooks on 1 November 2023 to mark the start of a six-month transition period. During this period, supported projects contributing to ESGF will continue to support existing installations, for instance, with the dissemination of security patches. Staring 1 May 2024, patching to existing installations will no longer be provided (sites would need to research manual security patching themselves) Instead, patching will only be made available for esgf-docker installs, for instance, updates to container images in the event of a security incident.

Looking for CMIP data? Please try the Metagrid web application now under Beta testing.

What is ESGF?

The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) enterprise system is a collaboration that develops, deploys and maintains software infrastructure for the management, dissemination, and analysis of model output and observational data. ESGF's primary goal is to facilitate advancements in Earth System Science. It is an interagency and international effort led by the Department of Energy (DOE), and co-funded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and international laboratories such as the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ), the Australian National University (ANU) National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), and the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). The ESGF mission is to:
  • Support current CMIP6 activities, and prepare for future assessments
  • Develop data and metadata facilities for inclusion of observations and reanalysis products for CMIP6 use
  • Enhance and improve current climate research infrastructure capabilities through involvement of the software development community and through adherence to sound software principles
  • Foster collaboration across agency and political boundaries
  • Integrate and interoperate with other software designed to meet the objectives of ESGF: e.g., software developed by NASA, NOAA, ESIP, and the European IS-INES
  • Create software infrastructure and tools that facilitate scientific advancements

ESGF P2P is a component architecture expressly designed to handle large-scale data management for worldwide distribution. The team of computer scientists and climate scientists has developed an operational system for serving climate data from multiple locations and sources. Model simulations, satellite observations, and reanalysis products are all being served from the ESGF P2P distributed data archive.

U.S. Sponsors

DOE

NASA

NOAA

NSF

European Sponsors       Australian Sponsors

IS-ENES

NCI