Earth System Documentation (ES-DOC) Preparation for CMIP6

Abstract:

During the course of 2015 the Earth System Documentation (ES-DOC) project began its preparations for CMIP6 (Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project 6) by further extending the ES-DOC tooling ecosystem in support of Earth System Model (ESM) documentation creation, search, viewing & comparison.

The ES-DOC online questionnaire, the ES-DOC desktop notebook, and the ES-DOC python toolkit will serve as multiple complementary pathways to generating CMIP6 documentation. It is envisaged that institutes will leverage these tools at different points of the CMIP6 lifecycle. Institutes will be particularly interested to know that the documentation burden will be either streamlined or completely automated.

As all the tools are tightly integrated with the ES-DOC web-service, institutes can be confident that the latency between documentation creation & publishing will be reduced to a minimum. Published documents will be viewable with the online ES-DOC Viewer (accessible via citable URL's).

Model inter-comparison scenarios will be supported using the ES-DOC online Comparator tool. The Comparator is being extended to:

• Support comparison of both Model descriptions & Simulation runs;

• Greatly streamline the effort involved in compiling official tables.

The entire ES-DOC ecosystem is open source and built upon open standards such as the Common Information Model (CIM) (versions 1 and 2).