Hosting downscaled decision-relevant community data products in ESGF2-US

Abstract

As regionally-relevant high-resolution Earth system data is increasingly relied upon across scientific, policy, and practitioner communities, there is an urgent need for coordinated and federated infrastructure to store, manage, standardize, and distribute decision-relevant community data products. Substantial effort is required to ensure that these products, which are often critical for regional impact assessments and decision-making, are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The Earth System Grid Federation US project (ESGF2-US) is addressing this challenge by expanding its open-source, distributed platform to support the hosting and dissemination of downscaled Earth system datasets. This expansion includes aligning new downscaled datasets with developing community standards for metadata and file structure, consistent with existing ESGF archives. This includes ensuring CF-compliance, applying CMORization where appropriate, and developing tools to streamline user access. In this paper, we highlight the technical and coordination work required to bring downscaled data into ESGF2-US and aim to inform the broader Earth system data user community about the growing availability and utility of these curated resources.