Earth System Grid Federation

NCI manages the Australian node of the international Earth Systems Grid Federation (ESGF). NCI is a core node of the ESGF, and delivers many reference data collections to researchers with peer centres including the US Department of Energy, NASA, UK Centre for Data Analysis, and the German climate research centre (DRKZ). The ESGF allows users to query and access the worldwide archive of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) data. Notably, NCI is the only ESGF node in the southern hemisphere, providing our users with direct, programmatic access to the data.

All Australian CMIP data is published from NCI via our node. NCI also has a local cached copy of high-demand variables from the international data and publishes it for broader access. Similarly, NCI’s ESGF node is deeply integrated with the international centres so that key variables of the Australian data can be selected and automatically replicated at the other nodes across the federation. To view all stored CMIP data, visit our ESGF data portal.