History

The ESMF collaboration had its roots in the Common Modeling Infrastructure Working Group (CMIWG), an unfunded, grass-roots effort to explore ways of enhancing collaborative Earth system model development. The CMIWG attracted broad participation from major weather and climate modeling groups at research and operational centers. In a series of meetings held from 1998 to 2000, CMIWG members established general requirements and a preliminary design for a common computational framework.

In September 2000, the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) released a Cooperative Agreement Notice entitled Increasing Interoperability and Performance of Grand Challenge Applications in the Earth, Space, Life and Microgravity Sciences that called for the creation of the ESMF. A "critical mass" of CMIWG participants agreed to develop a coordinated response, based on their strawman framework design, and submitted three linked proposals. The first focused on development of the core ESMF software, the second on deployment of ESMF modeling applications, and the third on deployment of ESMF data assimilation applications. All three proposals were funded, at a collective level of $9.8M. As the ESMF project gained momentum, it replaced the CMIWG as the focal point for developing community modeling infrastructure.

During the period of NASA funding, the ESMF team developed a prototype of the framework and used it in a number of experiments that demonstrated coupling of modeling components from different institutions. ESMF was also used as the basis for the construction of a new model, the GEOS-5 atmospheric general circulation model at NASA Goddard.

As the end of the first funding cycle for ESMF neared, ESMF collaborators wrote an ESMF Project Plan that defined a multi-agency organization. The Project Plan provided a framework for new partners and an orderly transition to new management bodies and processes. Major new grants came from NASA, through the Modeling Analysis and Prediction (MAP) program for Climate Variability and Change, and from the Department of Defense Battlespace Environments Institute. The NSF continued funding part of the development team through NCAR core funds. Many smaller application adoption projects were funded in domains as diverse as space weather and sediment transport.

At the end of the first funding cycle the ESMF team also wrote a white paper on Future Directions for the Earth System Modeling Framework. This paper formed the basis for a proposal to NSF to combine ESMF (and other frameworks) with data services to create a workflow environment. It was funded and has become the Earth System Curator project.

At this stage, the ESMF is a thriving community effort, with broad support for development, adoption, and future growth.