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| Climate Change | ||||
| Earth System Grid Data Support Nobel Peace Prize Efforts | ||||
| The Earth System Grid (ESG) project, a coalition of national laboratories (ANL, LANL, LBNL, LLNL, and ORNL), federal research centers (the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory), and universities (the University of Southern California) has worked to maximize the accessibility of climate simulation data by the international research community. Such access has been critical in supporting the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently named a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in "disseminating greater knowledge about man-made climate change." Dr. Dean Williams of LLNL is the PI on the ESG project. | ||||
| As part of DOE's SciDAC program, the ESG Center for Enabling Technology (CET) has developed metadata technologies (organization, extraction based on netCDF, and Metadata Catalog Services), security technologies (web-based user registration and authentication and community authorization), data transport technologies (for high-performance access, robust multiple file transport and integration with mass storage systems, and support for dataset aggregation and subsetting), web portal technologies (to provide interactive access to the data holdings), as well as popular analysis and visualization tools. | ||||
| One of the major ESG data collections supports the efforts of Working Group 1 of the IPCC. The IPCC archive includes simulation data from 12 numerical experiments performed with 25 different climate models, by researchers in 13 countries, and comprises 35 terabytes of data. To date, users from more than 1,300 registered analysis projects have downloaded more than 265 terabytes of data (914,000 files). Their analyses have resulted in more than 320 peer-reviewed publications, which were represented in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Analysis of the data continues, with downloads rising from 300 gigabytes/day to over 500 gigabytes/day, even after the publication of the IPCC report. | ||||
| The ESG CET project is now looking forward to the needs of the next IPCC Assessment Report, among the several modeling efforts it supports. Though the designs for the modeling experiments are not complete, the project team is extending the ESG system to be capable of supporting a multi-petabyte archive distributed over more than 20 sites around the world for the IPCC AR5 data. |
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| Contact: Dr. Dean Williams, williams13@llnl.gov
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| Published by IOP Publishing in association with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for the US Department of Energy, Office of Science. Copyright © 2007 by IOP. | ||||
