ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the design of the Earth System Grid Federation for climate science, and how housing, managing, searching, and disseminating climate data on massive scales are critical to national and international climate assessments. It also discusses the components comprising the data federation and discuss data preparations, secure access protocols and quality assurance, the movement of large-scale data, and network issues. To facilitate this collaboration, the international Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) developed software for universal climate data access in which data curation, preservation, dissemination, analysis, and visualization can be appropriately, reliably, and readily managed for a diverse user community. Although ESGF software is universal and opening up to host other forms of data such as observational and reanalysis data, its primary focus is to host the fifth phase of the coupled model intercomparison project data archive to be used for the upcoming IPCC AR5.
