NOAA Environmental Software Infrastructure and Interoperability (NESII) Group

The NESII group seeks to advance understanding and improve predictions of the Earth system by delivering infrastructure software that enables new scientific discoveries, fosters collaborations, and promotes resource efficiency.

For more information about NESII and NESII projects, see the NESII workspace on Earth System CoG.

	The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) is high-performance software infrastructure for building weather, climate, and related models. It enables models to be organized as sets of components representing physical domains and processes, such as atmospheres, oceans, and land masses. The components can be reused in different contexts and shared by multiple research and operational centers. ESMF also provides toolkits for common modeling functions, so modelers don't need to develop those utilities independently. More information: www.earthsystemmodeling.org One of the most powerful aspects of ESMF is the range of data structures that it accommodates: unstructured meshes, logically rectangular grids, observational data streams, and "exchange grids", which are merged grids used for conservative exchange of fluxes. ESMF enables users to remap among these different structures. A very easy way to gain access to ESMF grid remapping is a utility called ESMF_RegridWeightGen, which ingests grid files, and, in parallel, calculates and outputs interpolation weights. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/regridweightgen/
	ESMF Python (ESMP) is a Python interface to ESMF grid remapping. It targets the many Python users in the data services community, enabling them to bring fast, parallel ESMF regridding into their data analysis and visualization software. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/esmp/
	NUOPC (the National Unified Operational Prediction Capability) is a consortium of operational U.S. weather centers and their research partners. NUOPC aims to accelerate the transition of new technology, eliminate unnecessary duplication, and achieve a superior global prediction capability. The NUOPC Layer is a set of software conventions and templates that standardize the implementation of ESMF across models, increasing interoperability and ease of adoption. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/nuopc/
	ESMF web services enable ESMF high performance model components to be run within a service oriented architecture. This capability is a way to connect high performance climate models to services that model and deliver information about regional and local impacts. A pilot project explores using web services to couple an atmospheric model running on a supercomputer to a model that delivers regional hydrological information. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/esmfwebservices/.
	Earth System CoG is a software environment that supports community development in multi-project, distributed organizations. It collects and collates information across projects, including their values, processes, governance, repositories, and documents, supporting open development and decision-making processes. CoG is linked to an Earth System Grid Federation node, and offers easy access to associated services such as data archival, search, and visualization. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/cog/.
	Earth System Documentation (ES-DOC) is an international collaboration, led by E.U. partners. ES-DOC merges and replaces METAFOR and Earth System Curator, which focused on developing a climate model metadata schema (the Common Information Model, or CIM) and related tools. A main focus for these projects was metadata support for the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). ES-DOC continues this work, extending it to other intercomparison projects, model ensembles, and future climate assessments. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/es-doc-models/.
	OpenClimateGIS software provides access to and operations on climate model projections and climate derivatives in formats used by GIS software, browser-based mapping tools, and virtual globes. With OpenClimateGIS, a user can subset a climate dataset following arbitrary boundary definitions (e.g. watershed, county) or perform computations on the data. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/openclimategis/.
	The Cupid project is creating a software development and user training environment for climate models. There are two main activities. The first is the creation of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the Eclipse framework, work led by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The second is the componentization of GISS ModelE, a collaboration that includes staff from NOAA NESII, NASA GISS and NASA GSFC. Standard ESMF and NUOPC component interfaces will be prototyped. More information: http://www.earthsystemcog.org/projects/cupid/.