Greenbelt, MD IAWG Meeting

The 3rd ESMF Interagency Working Group Meeting was held at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on November 30, 2004. Participants included program managers and leads from the DoD, NOAA, NASA, NSF, and DOE and members of the ESMF Executive and Advisory Boards.

Participants Rick Allard, DoD NRL Stennis Don Anderson, NASA Headquarters Balaji, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Anjuli Bamzai, DOE Program Manager for the Climate Change Prediction Program Tom Clune, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Arlindo da Silva, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Cecelia DeLuca, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research Robert Ferraro, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Jim Fischer, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Mark Iredell, NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction Cliff Jacobs, NSF Headquarters Tsengdar Lee, NASA Headquarters Ants Leetmaa, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Director Steve Lord, NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction EMC Steve Lowder, DoD NRL Monterey Andrew Mark, DoD HPCMPO Doug Rotman, DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Paul Schopf, George Mason University and COLA Mike Seablom, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Quentin Stout, University of Michigan Max Suarez, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Action Items

The meeting began with a status update on ESMF development and applications, an update on the ESMF-PRISM collaboration, and an overview of the newly funded DoD BEI Institute. This was followed by a session during which agency leads presented strategic objectives. The afternoon was reserved for open discussion. Significant conclusions and outcomes included the following:

• Meeting participants found no obvious conflicts among agency strategic goals as they relate to ESMF.
• The ESMF aligns well with the President's multi-agency cost savings initiatives and is encouraging cross-agency communication, collaboration and coordination.
• Agency representatives present at the meeting are ready to request that higher-ups take seats on the ESMF Interagency Working Group. It is expected that participation will often be delegated to proxies.
• ESMF preliminary performance results for component overhead and regridding (see ESMF Status presentation) indicate that the framework will not introduce significant performance penalties.
• Work on incorporation of ESMF into applications and interoperability experiments is well underway (see ESMF Application Status presentation). Evaluation plans like the one developed for the Community Climate System Model are encouraged.
• The ESMF is open source software distributed under the Gnu Public License. This is compatible with plans for both public and restricted distribution of applications based on ESMF.

Action items and resolutions from the meeting included:

• Don Anderson will be Acting Chair of the Interagency Working Group.
• Meetings of the Interagency Working Group will be held twice a year in conjunction with the ESMF Executive Board.
• Agency representatives will provide names of high-level candidates for the ESMF Interagency Working Group to Don. He will coordinate the sending of letters requesting their participation.
• ESMF leads will refine and circulate the charge of the Interagency Working Group from the Project Plan, and the revised charge will be used in the letters of request for participation.
• ESMF leads will refine and circulate sections on goals and metrics from the Project Plan.
• ESMF leads will develop a short list of implications of the Project Plan.
• ESMF leads will discuss the configuration of the central repository and the contributions repository with Tom Clune and others, in the interest of allowing contributors to easily update to new ESMF versions.
• ESMF leads will plan for an ESMF special session and tutorial at next winter's AGU meeting and for an article in EOS or a comparable publication.