Work Plans

ESMF is in its third development cycle (2011-2016), with support from NASA, NOAA, NSF and the Department of Defense. The draft Strategic Plan for 2012-2015 outlines goals and directions for this period.

Previous Plans

The chart below describes the five major phases in ESMF development through its first and second funding cycles (2002-2010). They correspond to major version increments. Implementation began in 2002 with a prototype (v1) that helped to define the project scope. The next phase focused on the implementation of the ESMF Component layer, including the Virtual Machine (VM) and a set of utilities (v2). After that, development focused on an Array class that supports a variety of index space operations (v3). This Array class was combined with Grid, Mesh, Location Stream and Field classes to perform higher-level operations such as regridding (v4). The objective of the last phase was to standardize behavior and interfaces across the framework (v5). After v5, subsequent framework releases will have backward compatible method interfaces (with exceptions for newer methods).