The United States Air Force (USAF) has a proud and storied tradition of enabling significant advancements in the area of characterizing and modeling land state information. 557th Weather Wing (557 WW; DoD’s Executive Agent for Land Information) provides routine geospatial intelligence information to warfighters, planners, and decision makers at all echelons and services of the U.S. military, government and intelligence community. 557 WW and its predecessors have been home to the DoD’s only operational regional and global land data analysis systems since January 1958. As a trusted partner since 2005, Air Force Weather (AFW) has relied on the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA/GSFC to lead the interagency scientific collaboration known as the Land Information System (LIS). LIS is an advanced software framework for high performance land surface modeling and data assimilation of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) information.

Integrated geographic modelling and simulation is a computational means to improve understanding of the environment. With the development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web technologies, it is possible to conduct open, extensible integrated geographic modelling across a network in which resources can be accessed and integrated, and further distributed geographic simulations can be performed. This open web-distributed modelling and simulation approach is likely to enhance the use of existing resources and can attract diverse participants. With this approach, participants from different physical locations or domains of expertise can perform comprehensive modelling and simulation tasks collaboratively. This paper reviews past integrated modelling and simulation systems, highlighting the associated development challenges when moving to an open web-distributed system. A conceptual framework is proposed to introduce a roadmap from a system design perspective, with potential use cases provided. The four components of this conceptual framework - a set of standards, a resource sharing environment, a collaborative integrated modelling environment, and a distributed simulation environment - are also discussed in detail with the goal of advancing this emerging field.

Significant progress has been made within the last couple of years towards developing online coupled systems aimed at providing more accurate descriptions of atmospheric chemistry processes to improve performance of global aerosol and air quality forecasts. Operating within the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) research-to-operation initiative to implement the fully-coupled Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS), cooperative development efforts have delivered two integrated online global prediction systems for aerosols (GEFS-Aerosols) and air quality (FV3GFS-AQM). These systems include recent advances in aerosol convective transport and wet deposition processes introduced into the SAS scheme of the National Center for Environmental Prediction’s (NCEP) latest Global Forecast System (GFS) based on the Finite-Volume cubed-sphere dynamical core (FV3). GEFS-Aerosols is slated to become the new control member of the NWS Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS). The model features an online-coupled version of the Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model with a biomass-burning, plume-rise model and recent advances from NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), along with a state-of-the-art FENGSHA dust scheme from NOAA Air Resource Laboratory (ARL). FV3GFS-AQM incorporates a coupled, single-column adaptation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model to improve NOAA’s current National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC). Both coupled systems’ design and development benefited from the use of the National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC) Layer, which provided a common model architecture for interoperable, coupled model components within the framework of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling System (NEMS). Results from each of the described coupled systems will be discussed.

The Earth System Prediction Suite (ESPS) is a collection of flagship U.S. weather and climate models and model components that are being instrumented to conform to interoperability conventions, documented to follow metadata standards, and made available either under open source terms or to credentialed users. The ESPS represents a culmination of efforts to create a common Earth system model architecture, and the advent of increasingly coordinated model development activities in the U.S. ESPS component interfaces are based on the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), community-developed software for building and coupling models, and the National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC) Layer, a set of ESMF-based component templates and interoperability conventions. This shared infrastructure simplifies the process of model coupling by guaranteeing that components conform to a set of technical and semantic behaviors. The ESPS encourages distributed, multi-agency development of coupled modeling systems, controlled experimentation and testing, and exploration of novel model configurations, such as those motivated by research involving managed and interactive ensembles. ESPS codes include the Navy Global Environmental Model (NavGEM), HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM), and Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS®); the NOAA Environmental Modeling System (NEMS) and the Modular Ocean Model (MOM); the Community Earth System Model (CESM); and the NASA ModelE climate model and GEOS-5 atmospheric general circulation model.

AbstractFor users of climate services, the ability to quickly determine the datasets that best fit one’s needs would be invaluable. The volume, variety, and complexity of climate data makes this judgment difficult. The ambition of CHARMe (Characterization of metadata to enable high-quality climate services) is to give a wider interdisciplinary community access to a range of supporting information, such as journal articles, technical reports, or feedback on previous applications of the data. The capture and discovery of this “commentary” information, often created by data users rather than data providers, and currently not linked to the data themselves, has not been significantly addressed previously. CHARMe applies the principles of Linked Data and open web standards to associate, record, search, and publish user-derived annotations in a way that can be read both by users and automated systems. Tools have been developed within the CHARMe project that enable annotation capability for data delivery systems ...

This article describes the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) mission and an international integration strategy for data, database and computational architecture, and stable infrastructure highlighted by the authors (the ESGF Executive Committee). These highlights are key developments needed over the next five to seven years in response to large-scale national and international climate community projects that depend on ESGF for success. Quality assurance and baseline performance from laptop to high performance computing characterizes available and potential data streams and strategies. These are required for interactive data collections to remedy gaps in handling enormous international federated climate data archives. Appropriate cyber security ensures protection of data according to projects but still allows access and portability to different ESGF and individual groups and users. A timeline and plan for forecasting interoperable tools takes ESGF from a federated database archive to a robust virtual laboratory and concludes the article.

Weather forecasting and climate modeling are grand challenge problems because of the complexity and diversity of the processes that must be simulated. The Earth system modeling community is driven to finer resolution grids and faster execution times by the need to provide accurate weather and seasonal forecasts, long term climate projections, and information about societal impacts such as droughts and floods. The models used in these simulations are generally written by teams of specialists, with each team focusing on a specific physical domain, such as the atmosphere, ocean, or sea ice. These specialized components are connected where their surfaces meet to form composite models that are largely self-consistent and allow for important cross-domain feedbacks. Since the components are often developed independently, there is a need for standard component interfaces and "coupling" software that transforms and transfers data so that outputs match expected inputs in the composite modeling system. The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) project began in 2002 as a multi-agency effort to define a standard component interface and architecture, and to pool resources to develop shareable utilities for common functions such as grid remapping, time management and I/O. The ESMF development team was charged with making the infrastructure sufficiently general to accommodate many different numerical approaches and legacy modeling systems, as well as making it reliable, portable, well-documented, accurate, and high performance. To satisfy this charge, the development team needed to develop innovative numerical and computational methods, a formal and rigorous approach to interoperability, and distributed development and testing processes that promote software quality. ESMF has evolved to become the leading U.S. framework in the climate and weather communities, with users including the Navy, NASA, the National Weather Service, and community models supported by the National Science Foundation. In this talk, we will present ESMF's evolution, approach, and future plans.

Understanding regional-scale water resource systems requires understanding coupled hydrologic and climate interactions. The traditional approach in the hydrologic sciences and engineering fields has been to either treat the atmosphere as a forcing condition on the hydrologic model, or to adopt a specific hydrologic model design in order to be interoperable with a climate model. We propose here a different approach that follows a service-oriented architecture and uses standard interfaces and tools: the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) from the weather and climate community and the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI) from the hydrologic community. A novel technical challenge of this work is that the climate model runs on a high performance computer and the hydrologic model runs on a personal computer. In order to complete a two-way coupling, issues with security and job scheduling had to be overcome. The resulting application demonstrates interoperability across disciplinary boundaries and has the potential to address emerging questions about climate impacts on local water resource systems. The approach also has the potential to be adapted for other climate impacts applications that involve different communities, multiple frameworks, and models running on different computing platforms. We present along with the results of our coupled modeling system a scaling analysis that indicates how the system will behave as geographic extents and model resolutions are changed to address regional-scale water resources management problems.

The Earth System Prediction Capability (

The complexity of Earth system models and their applications is increasing as a consequence of scientific advances, user demand, and the ongoing development of computing platforms, storage systems and distributed high-resolution observation networks. Multi-component Earth system models need to be redesigned to make interactions among model components and other applications external to the modeling system easier. To that end, the common component interfaces of Earth system models can be redesigned to increase interoperability between models and other applications such as various web services, data portals and science gateways. The models can be made self-describing so that the many configuration, build options and inputs of a simulation can be recorded. In this paper, we present a coupled modeling system that includes the proposed methodology to create self-describing models with common model component interfaces. The designed coupled atmosphere-ocean modeling system is also integrated into a scientific workflow system to simplify routine modeling tasks and relationships between these tasks and to demonstrate the enhanced interoperability between different technologies and components. Later on, the work environment is tested using a realistic Earth system modeling application. As can be seen through this example, a layered design for collecting provenance and metadata has the added benefit of documenting a run in far greater detail than before. In this way, it facilitates exploration and understanding of simulations and leads to possible reproducibility. In addition to designing self-describing Earth system models, the regular modeling tasks are also simplified and automated by using a scientific workflow which provides meaningful abstractions for the model, computing environment and provenance/metadata collection mechanisms. Our aim here is to solve a specific instance of a complex model integration problem by using a framework and scientific workflow approach together. The reader may also note that the methods presented in this paper might be also generalized to other types of Earth system models, leading to improved ease of use and flexibility. The initial results also show that the coupled atmosphere-ocean model, which is controlled by the designed workflow environment, is able to reproduce the Mediterranean Sea surface temperature when it is compared with the used CCSM3 initial and boundary conditions.

ESMF was motivated by the desire to exchange modeling components amongst modelling centres and to reduce costs and effort by sharing codes.