WaterML Schema Export from ESMF

Participants

Xinqi Wang/Louisiana State University, Sylvia Murphy/ESMF Core Team

For questions on this project, please contact curator@list.woc.noaa.gov.

Motivation

Large scale science projects are often multidisciplinary and involve scientists and engineers distributed throughout the world. Scientists often need to access data archives that are stored in different schema or from a different domain. This project seeks to alleviate the data heterogeneity problem that exists between the climate and weather domain and the hydrologic domain.

Approach

The approach taken was to implement WaterML, a widely used data standard in hydrologic science, as a standard Attribute Package in ESMF, a modeling framework whose users are primarily in the weather and climate domain. ESMF Attributes are name/value pairs that are used to store model metadata. Since ESMF adoption requires that the framework hold information about model data structures, grids, and components, models instrumented with Attributes have access to a great deal of structured information. ESMF Attributes can be written out in XML and from there, ingested into various portals. A publically available ESMF use test case was developed that illustrates use of this prototype capability.

The figure above illustrates the ESMF attribute packages that were created to implement WaterML. WaterML is a type of XML that contains both metadata about the data as a whole (usually a point time series) but also contains metadata about individual data elements. Separate attribute packages were created to replicate this structure and then nested together. The ability to next attribute packages is a key feature of ESMF's Attribute Class.

References

• Wang, X., (2009), Exporting WaterML from the Earth System Modeling Framework. (Download PowerPoint file)