The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published an article in August 2015 highlighting the Earth System Grid Federation, titled A Global Repository for Planet-Sized Experiments and Observations.
“The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) allows users to access, analyse, and visualize data using a globally federated collection of networks, computers, and software. Its architecture employs a system of geographically distributed peer nodes that are independently administered yet united by common federation protocols and application programming interfaces (API)..." read the article