Abstract
As regionally-relevant high-resolution Earth system data is increasingly relied upon across scientific, policy, and practitioner communities, there is an urgent need for coordinated and federated infrastructure to store, manage, standardize, and distribute decision-relevant community data products. Substantial effort is required to ensure that these products, which are often critical for regional impact assessments and decision-making, are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The Earth System Grid Federation US project (ESGF2-US) is addressing this challenge by expanding its open-source, distributed platform to support the hosting and dissemination of downscaled Earth system datasets. This expansion includes aligning new downscaled datasets with developing community standards for metadata and file structure, consistent with existing ESGF archives. This includes ensuring CF-compliance, applying CMORization where appropriate, and developing tools to streamline user access. In this paper, we highlight the technical and coordination work required to bring downscaled data into ESGF2-US and aim to inform the broader Earth system data user community about the growing availability and utility of these curated resources.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 011002 |
| Journal | Environmental Research: Climate |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2026 |
Funding
This research was supported by the Earth System Grid Federation 2—US (ESGF2-US) project, which is sponsored by the Data Management Program of the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD) of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) in the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. The work of S K A, P J D, P J G, K E T, and P U at PCMDI is performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. IM Release No. LLNL-JRNL-2010566. The material from the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories was funded by a contract from the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) under Project NH24-8916. This manuscript has been authored at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US DOE. The US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or to allow others to do so, for US government purposes. By accepting this article for publication, the publisher acknowledges this license. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ).
Keywords
- ESGF
- downscaled data
- metadata standards