The Finnish Meteorological Institute is now building up experience of distributing large amounts of data using cloud services. Since 2017, the Hirlam weather forecasting model covering Europe have been provided in Amazon’s cloud services (AWS S3 Bucket). The objective of the data distribution in the cloud is to increase the utility and effective use of weather and climate data.
In 2019, the Finnish Meteorological Institute is adding new data into the Public Datasets. Global SILAM atmospheric composition and air quality forecast with an unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.2 x 0.2 degree and hourly time step. The forecast is updated daily and spans over 5 days forwards. Predicted quantities include all main trace gases, a variety of primary and secondary aerosols, as well as derived parameters, such as atmospheric optical density. The forecasts are made with the latest emission from vegetation fires derived from near-real-time satellite observations.
The data is licenced with The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). That is, the users may freely use, distribute and modify the data presuming that the original producer is attributed. The data is available in two different formats. NetCDF is a traditional format used in environmental science. Moreover, the data is converted also into Zarr-format to enable easy and efficient processing in cloud environments with software like Pangeo. While the service is particularly practical for anyone processing the data in the cloud, AWS Public Dataset program provides a great channel to distribute and consume the data for all users.
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