EARTH SYSTEM MODELING FRAMEWORK
Community Requirements Meeting

30 May 2002
Grand Hyatt Hotel
Washington, D.C., U.S.A

We are pleased to invite you to the first open community meeting of
the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) project on 30 May 2002 at
the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C. Our interdisciplinary
collaboration includes the NOAA National Centers for Environmental
Prediction, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NSF National
Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
DOE Argonne National Laboratory, DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory,
the University of Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Our three-year effort is being sponsored by the NASA Earth
Science Technology Office.

The ESMF collaboration is developing a framework of software tools and
standards for building and combining components of climate models,
numerical weather prediction and data assimilation systems, and other
Earth science applications. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss
and collect software infrastructure and coupling requirements.
Subsequent ESMF community meetings, to be held next year and the year
after, will focus on the ESMF programming interface and using the ESMF
in applications. Active and broad participation in ESMF development
will enable us to build a framework that will serve the needs of both
national modeling centers and the individual academic researcher.

We encourage you to attend for all or part of the day. The Grand
Hyatt Hotel is within walking distance of the Washington Convention
Center, where the Spring American Geophysical Union meeting will be in
session on the same day. An overview of the ESMF project will be
provided in the Constitution Ballroom of the Grand Hyatt at 10:00 AM.

The areas we will be eliciting requirements for include: component
coupling interfaces, regridding and interpolation, fields and grids,
I/O, time management, performance profiling, logging, and error
handling. The ESMF development team will provide a draft set of
requirements in advance of the meeting for community review. We will
also provide on-line forms for participants to comment on draft
requirements or submit new requirements. These will be available on
the ESMF website on 17 May 2002.

Visit the ESMF website now to learn more about the ESMF project and
to view an agenda for the ESMF Community Requirements Meeting. If
you are interested in attending the meeting, would like to be added
to an ESMF informational mailing list, or have questions about ESMF,
email us at esmf@ucar.edu.