2 The ESMF User's Guide

This ESMF User's Guide is mainly an installation and build guide for the new ESMF user and a build reference for the experienced user. New users are strongly encouraged to download the ESMF software and try running a quick start program, quick_start, that illustrates both ESMF utilities and coupling services.

The User's Guide is organized as follows. The next two sections, 3 and 4, concern user support and how to submit comments on the ESMF system to our development team. Sections 5 through 10 contain a Quick Start guide that explains how to install the ESMF software and run the self-tests, followed by more detail on ESMF structure and operation, such as a description of the directory structure and how to build and run the ESMF examples and quick start programs. Section 11 is an architectural overview that describes the framework's basic goals and features. Section 12 details the steps required to adapt a component for use with ESMF. Finally, to help you become familiar with ESMF terminology, the last section in the User's Guide is a glossary.

Figure 1: Schematic of the ESMF ``sandwich'' architecture. In this design the framework consists of two parts, an upper level superstructure layer and a lower-level infrastructure layer. User code is sandwiched between these two layers.