NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) is dedicated to understanding the total Earth system and the effects of natural and human-induced changes on the global environment. The vantage point of space provides information about Earth's land, atmosphere, ice, oceans, and biota that is obtainable in no other way. Programs of the Enterprise study the interactions among these components to advance the new discipline of Earth System Science, with a near-term emphasis on global climate change. Advanced information systems are used to process, archive, access, visualize, and communicate Earth science data. Advanced computing and communications concepts that permit the transmission and management of terabytes of data are essential to NASA's vision of a global observational network.

Effective use of data produced by NASA's observational network requires software and computing resources that can process the information to enhance our understanding and ability to predict changes in the Earth System. The Computational Technologies (CT) Program develops high-performance computational applications to foster and achieve ESE modeling interoperability within the relevant science communities. The CT Program enables community wide improvement of scientific modeling and simulation codes that benefit the enterprise, government organizations, and the public.

To achieve its goals, the CT program has funded the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF). The ESMF is a national-scale collaboration involving NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, and academia. The ESMF is developing a high-performance, flexible software infrastructure to increase ease of use, performance portability, interoperability, and reuse in climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, and other Earth science applications. The ESMF defines an architecture for composing multi-component applications and includes data structures and utilities for developing model components. The intent is to create a framework usable by individual researchers as well as major operational and research centers, and seek to engage the community in its development. This paper will discuss the technological challenges currently facing the Earth Science community and describe how the CT program and the ESMF project can empower the scientific community and accelerate our ability to understand the complete Earth system; enabling Earth system science improvements in the prediction of climate, weather, and natural hazards.