Priority 4: Creating an Earth System Knowledge Environment
NCAR continues to develop an Earth System Knowledge Environment that fosters knowledge sharing and accelerates scientific workflow. NCAR continues to develop an Earth System Knowledge Environment, new cyberinfrastructure that combines models, data, experiments, collaborative tools, and information resources in a way that fosters knowledge sharing and accelerates scientific workflow. NCAR is creating integrated, collaborative problem-solving environments that advance the community's ability to engage in research and scientific discovery. Efforts span modeling frameworks, data and knowledge management and access, collaboration, and analysis and visualization. We cultivate opportunities to:
- Advance the state of the art through research and development grants complemented by core funding
- Transition the most promising and effective results into production capabilities that we support and distribute
- Integrate across capabilities to amplify our investments
The ultimate goal is to realize an end-to-end simulation and analysis environment that supports the execution of complex scientific workflows and enables a new era of scientific discovery. With support from multiple sponsors, we have continued to innovate via a portfolio of strategic, complementary projects.
One such project is The Earth System Grid (ESG), which is a collaborative Data Grid that makes our terascale climate simulation data readily available to a worldwide community. It currently provides most of the joint NSF/DOE climate change simulations conducted over the last six years as well as the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report data holdings. In FY 2006, we have published a large volume of new datasets and IPCC assets, and we improved the function and performance of many aspects of the data services. This five-year project has been successfully completed, and the ESG is being integrated into the TeraGrid.