European Weather Cloud at the service of the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI)

Since 2019, ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) together with EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) initiated a project named “European Weather Cloud” (https://www.europeanweather.cloud/) expected to become operational in 2022. The strategic goal of this initiative is to build and offer a community cloud infrastructure on which Member and Co‐operating States of both organizations can create and manage on demand virtual resources enabling access to the ECMWF’s Numerical Weather Predication (NWP) products and EUMETSAT’s satellite data in a timely, efficient, and configurable fashion. Moreover, one of the main goals is to involve more entities in this initiative in a joint effort to form a federation of clouds/data offered from our Member States, for the maximum benefit of the European Meteorological Infrastructure.

During the current pilot phase of the project several use cases have been defined, mostly aimed at service developers own organisations. These broad categories of use cases are:

• Web services exploring hosted datasets.
• Infrastructure allowing the running of an atmospheric dispersion model on ECMWF forecast data.
• Platform to support the training of machine learning models on archive datasets.
• Platform to support workshops and training courses (DWD/ICON model training, various ECMWF training courses)
• Environment facilitating research in collaboration with external partners.

Some examples of the use cases currently developed at the European Weather Cloud are:

• The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium prepares ECMWF forecast data for use in a local atmospheric dispersion model.
• The German weather service, which is already feeding maps generated by a server it deployed on the cloud into its public GeoPortal service.
• The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute hosts a climate explorer web application based on KNMI climate explorer data and ECMWF weather and climate reanalyses.
• EUMETSAT Numerical Weather Prediction Satellite Application Facility (NWP SAF) develops a training module will develop a training module for a fast radiative transfer model (RTTOV) based on ERA5 reanalysis data.
• EUMETSAT and ECMWF joint use case assess bias correction schemes for the assimilation of radiance data based on several satellite data time series.

During the current pilot phase of the project, both organizations have organised user and technical workshops to actively engage with the meteorological community to align the evolution of the European Weather Cloud to reflect and satisfy their goals and needs.

In this presentation, the status of the project will be analysed describing the existing infrastructure, the offered services and how these are accessed by the end-users along with examples of the existing use cases. The plans, next steps for the evolution and the transition to operations of the European Weather Cloud and its relationship with other projects and initiatives will conclude the presentation.