TJ22.2 The Copernicus Climate Data Store: ECMWF’s Approach to Providing Online Access to Climate Data and Tools

Thursday, 10 January 2019: 8:45 AM
North 123 (Phoenix Convention Center - West and North Buildings)
Cedric Bergeron, ECMWF, Reading, UK; and B. Raoult, A. Lopez-Alos, G. Biavati, E. Damasio-Da-Costa, K. Marsh, I. Rozum, J. N. Thépaut, and D. Dee

Data about Earth’s climate is being gathered at an ever-increasing rate. To organize and provide access to this data, the Copernicus (European Union's Earth Observation Program) Climate Change Service (C3S) operated by ECMWF released the Climate Data Store (CDS) on 14th of June 2018. The aim of the C3S service is to help a diverse set of users, including policy-makers, businesses and scientists, to investigate and tackle climate change and the CDS provides the platform and freely available data to enable this.

The CDS provides reliable information about the past, present and future climate, on global, continental, and regional scales. It contains a variety of data types, including satellite observations, in-situ measurements, climate model projections and seasonal forecasts.

It is set to give free access to this huge amount of open climate data, presenting new opportunities to all those who require authoritative information on climate change. A quick 'click-and-go' experience via a simple, uniform user interface offers easy online access to a wealth of climate data that anyone can freely browse and download after a simple registration process.

As well as discovering and browsing trusted datasets, users can use the CDS Toolbox to analyze CDS data online by building their own data processing workflows and their own web-based applications. The variety of data types, data formats, as well as large data volumes, makes their combined use highly challenging. The integrated online CDS toolbox abstracts the physical location of the datasets, their access methods, formats, units, etc. allowing applications developers to focus on algorithms. The toolbox provides a series of tools that perform basic operations on the datasets, such as differences or re-gridding, as well as statistical computations such as means or standard deviations; tools can then be combined into more elaborated workflows, and present there results graphically on the CDS web site.

The CDS is continually being optimized and expanded through interaction with users. It can be accessed at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu.

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