The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) – the international collaboration for the software that powers most global climate change research, notably assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ­– was awarded as “Outstanding partnership” in the context of the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s (FLC) Far West Regional competition.

ESGF manages the first-ever decentralized database for handling climate science data, with multiple petabytes of data at dozens of federated sites worldwide. It is recognized as the leading infrastructure for the management and access of large distributed data volumes for climate change research. It supports the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), whose protocols enable the periodic assessments carried out by the IPCC.

Using a system of geographically distributed peer nodes—independently administered yet united by common protocols and interfaces—the ESGF community holds the premier collection of simulations and observational and reanalysis data for climate change research.

The 2013 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report uses data from simulation model runs for the latest incarnation of CMIP5.

To date, ESGF has made available more than 60 large-scale CMIP5 simulation model runs (more than 1.8 petabytes of data) from 27 worldwide climate research centers spanning 21 countries. ESGF portals are gateways to scientific data collections hosted at sites around the globe that allow the user to register and access the entire ESGF network of data and services. The open-source ESGF is used by virtually the entire climate research community.

The Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change is partner in ESGF (CMCC-CMIP5 data are available through the CMCC/ESGF Data node) with outstanding Centers such as Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the German Climate Computing Center, the British Atmospheric Data Centre, Goddard Space Flight Center, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace and the LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) which leads the federation.