The Earth System Metrics and Diagnostics Standards serve as a guidance document for the design of Earth system metrics and diagnostics based software utilities. The standards document provides requirements for software interfaces, metadata, and metrics output format that are designed to promote the interoperability of software packages and reproducibility of results.
The Earth System Metrics and Diagnostics Standards can be accessed in this repository at standards.md. This is a living document that can be updated at any time. The procedures for updating the standards is provided in the Governance section.
The Earth System Metrics and Diagnostics Standards arose from a collaboration on common standards between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Model Diagnostic Task Force (MDTF) https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/mdtf-diagnostics and the Department of Energy Coordinated Model Evaluation Capabilities (CMEC) effort https://cmec.llnl.gov/. The MDTF-CMEC coordination has been a bottom-up scientific collaboration, initiated in 2019 by P. Ullrich (CMEC) and D. Neelin (MDTF), recognizing the usefulness of a common standard and design commonalities that facilitate this.
The EMDF aims to foster interoperability of climate and weather model evaluation tools across agencies and among research groups, facilitating the flow of diagnostics from process research to improvement of climate models and helping to create a natural continuum between performance metrics and process oriented diagnostics. Outreach to additional agencies with related model evaluation requirements is underway.
Projects that make use of these standards include Coordinated Model Evaluation Capabilities (CMEC) and NOAA Model Diagnostics Task Force (MDTF).