Telespazio VEGA UK has recently released a first version of a new European climate data hub called the Climate Data Store.
The Climate Data Store (CDS) has been developed as part of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which is operated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on behalf of, and funded by, the European Commission. It provides a single European point of access to climate data and indicators to help the public and private sector understand past and future impact of climate change across a variety of market sectors. Ground, satellite and model-based information is provided about a wealth of ocean, land and atmospheric Earth system parameters in a standard data format.
The CDS has been designed as a distributed system, providing improved and harmonised access to a variety of different types of existing datasets such as observations, global / regional climate reanalyses, global / regional climate projections and seasonal forecasts. It will offer the following interfacing services:
- Website / Portal, allows intelligent search and filtering such as by parameter and in geo-location and time
- Application Programming Interface (API), allows external software to interact with the CDS programmatically
- Web Map Service (WMS), allows standard download and preview of map layers for visualisation
- Quality Information, allows discovery, appraisal and selection of appropriate data
- Toolbox, provides an authoritative set of software which the user can invoke to perform processing, computation, transformation and complex visualisation of the catalogued data
A full Agile Scrum development methodology is being utilised which allows a strongly iterative approach and the ability to react quickly to user requirements.
Marco Folino, CEO of Telespazio VEGA UK said: “We are excited about our key involvement in a fundamental part of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The ability to provide harmonized access to such a wealth of climate data will stimulate increased and innovative use of this data in climate adaption and mitigation based services to benefit business and wider society.”