A Distributed Computing Infrastructure for the Evaluation of Climate Models Using NASA Observational Data

We describe and motivate an emerging distributed data analysis environment for the empirical evaluation of climate models. This work has several components, including: model scoring, initialization and parameterization, all of which require massive amounts of NASA observational data. Though the effort is in its nascence, there has been recent success in partnering with the DOE Earth System Grid to unify data from NASA’s AIRS mission and model outputs available from the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI).