The IPCC is a scientific inter governmental body, established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), to provide decision-makers and others interested in climate change with an objective source of information. The IPCC does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate-related data or parameters. Its role is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation.
The IPCC would ultimately like climate researchers to have access to 1,500 terabytes of data – fifty-times more than previously available. Storing this data volume using conventional methods would be difficult, so the IPCC is considering a distributed archive based on the pooled resources of the British Atmospheric Data Center, the World Data Center for Climate in Germany and a US federation led by the PCMDI, which is headquartered at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and funded by the Climate Change Research Division of the DoE’s Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program.
The Earth System Grid (ESG) is the team responsible for developing the IPCC’s distributed archive. ESG software will form the heart of the distributed archive, and the ESG group of Earth Science research centers will form a natural extension of the core data archive. To keep the data secure, ESG is adopting the Natural Environment Research Council DataGrid’s (NDG) NDG Security software, which provides authentication of a user’s identity and authorization of their rights over distributed resources. This will facilitate the inclusion of other institutions into the consortium, whether they are from Europe, the US or elsewhere.
URL:
www.isgtw.org/?pid=1001557
www.ipcc.ch
Collaborators:
UK:
British Atmospheric Data Center
Germany:
World Data Center for Climate
USA:
Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI); Earth System Grid (ESG) – a collaboration of Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute
