intake-esgf 2026.1.26

Programmatic access to the ESGF holdings

intake-esgf

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Announcement

ESGF is in the process of decomissioning the old index technology (Solr). While this process takes place, you may find some services may be broken or disappear completely. The information in the US-based Solr indices has been moved into a Globus (ElasticSearch) index which is this package's default index.

Overview

intake-esgf is an intake-esm inspired package under development in ESGF2. The main difference is that in place of querying a static index which is completely loaded at runtime, intake-esgf catalogs initialize empty and are populated by searching, querying ESGF index nodes.

Installation

You may install intake-esgf using pip:

python -m pip install intake-esgf

or conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge intake-esgf

Features

For a full listing of features with code examples, please consult the documentation. In brief, intake-esgf aims to hide some of the complexity of obtaining ESGF data and get the user the data as fast as we can.

• Indices are queried in parallel and report when they fail to return a response. The results are aggregated and presented to the user as a pandas DataFrame.
• The locations of the data are hidden from the user. Internally we track which locations provide the user the fastest transfers and automatically favor them for you.
• Files are downloaded in parallel into a local cache which mirrors the remote storage directory structure. They are returned to the user as a dictionary of xarray Datasets. Your search script then becomes the way you download data as well as how you load it into memory for your analysis.
• Prior to downloading data, we first check that it is not already available locally. This could be because you had previously downloaded it, but also because you are working on a server that has direct access.
• Cell measure information is harvested from your search results and automatically included in the returned datasets.