The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), which is a national-scale collaboration involving earth scientists and computational experts from major U.S. modeling centers, 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.

One of the main goals of the ESMF is to develop a standard interface which will clearly separate model components and couplers, so thatinteroperable components can be shared andreused.

This paper will discuss the results of two interoperability experiments involving the operational data assimilation system from NOAA's NCEP as well as climate model components from NCAR (fvCAM) and NASA's GMAO (ARIES). The fvCAM-SSI and the ARIES-SSI interoperability experiments enables the intercomparison of systems for NASA/NOAA and NCAR/NOAA satellite data assimilation.