Earth System Modeling Framework

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The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) is open-source software for building climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, and other Earth science software applications. These applications are computationally demanding and usually run on supercomputers. The ESMF is considered a technical layer, integrated into a sophisticated common modeling infrastructure for interoperability. Other aspects of interoperability and shared infrastructure include: common experimental protocols, common analytic methods, common documentation standards for data and data provenance, shared workflow, and shared model components.^[1]

The ESMF project is distinguished by its strong emphasis on community governance and distributed development, and by a diverse customer base that includes modeling groups from universities, major U.S. research centers, the National Weather Service, the Department of Defense, and NASA. The ESMF development team was centered at NCAR until 2009, after which it moved to the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories.

Editing Earth System Modeling Framework is free software released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License.