European Weather Cloud: A community cloud tailored for big Earth modelling and EO data processing

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) together with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) have worked together to offer to their Member States a new paradigm to access and consume weather data and services. The “European Weather Cloud-(EWC)” (https://www.europeanweather.cloud/), concluded its pilot phase and is expected to become operational during the first months of 2023.

This initiative aims to offer a community cloud infrastructure on which Member and Co‐operating States of both organizations can create on demand virtual compute (including GPUs) and storage resources to gain easy and high throughput access to the ECMWF’s Numerical Weather Predication (NWP) and EUMETSAT’s satellite data in a timely and configurable fashion. Moreover, one of the main goals is to involve more National Meteorological Services to jointly form a federation of clouds/data offered from their Member States, for the maximum benefit of the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI). During the pilot phase of the project, both organizations have jointly hosted user and technical workshops to actively engage with the meteorological community and align the evolution of the EWC to reflect and satisfy their operational goals and needs.

The EWC, in its pilot phase hosted several use cases, mostly aimed at users in the developers’ own organisations. These broad categories of these cases are:

• Web services to explore hosted datasets
• Data processing applications
• Platforms to support the training of machine learning models on archive datasets
• Workshops and training courses (e.g., ICON model training, ECMWF training etc)
• Research in collaboration with external partners
• World Meteorological Organization (WMO) support with pilots and PoC.

Some examples of the use cases currently developed at the EWC are:

• The German weather service DWD, which is already feeding maps generated by a server it deployed on the cloud into its public GeoPortal service.
• EUMETSAT and ECMWF joint use case assesses bias correction schemes for the assimilation of radiance data based on several satellite data time series
• the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) hosts a climate explorer web application based on KNMI climate explorer data and ECMWF weather and climate reanalyses
• The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium prepares ECMWF forecast data for use in a local atmospheric dispersion model.
• NordSat, a collaboration of northern European countries which is developing and testing imagery generation tools in preparation for the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite products.
• UK Met Office with the DataProximateCompute use case, which distributes compute workload close to data, with the automatic creation and disposal of Dask clusters, as well as the data plane VPN network, on demand and in heterogeneous cloud environments.

In this presentation, the status of the project, the offered services and how these are accessed by the end users along with examples of the existing use cases will be analysed. The plans, next steps for the evolution of the EWC and its relationship with other projects and initiatives (like DestinE) will conclude the presentation.