ESGF

ESGF, the Earth System Grid Federation, is a distributed network and software platform that enables sharing, discovery, access, and preservation of climate model output, observational data, and related resources across participating institutions worldwide. It provides a scalable infrastructure for storing and indexing large datasets and offers services that support data discovery, subsetting, and download through standard protocols such as OPeNDAP, GridFTP, and THREDDS Data Server.

The federation operates as a network of data nodes hosted by national laboratories, universities, and research centers. Each node stores local copies of data and exposes a common metadata catalog and search interface. A central Mercury search layer indexes metadata across nodes, allowing users to locate data from CMIP projects (such as CMIP5 and CMIP6) and other climate-relevant datasets.

Data are typically stored in NetCDF with CF conventions and are shared under data-use policies developed by participating centers. Access is generally open to the research community, although some data may have restricted access or require registration. ESGF emphasizes data provenance, citation, and interoperability, enabling reproducible analyses and model intercomparison studies.

The ESGF was established in the early 2000s to support the distribution of large climate datasets and to facilitate collaboration among modeling centers. It has evolved alongside major climate data programs and remains a cornerstone of modern climate data infrastructure. It is governed by a consortium of participating data centers and projects that adopt common standards and governance policies.