Towards a modernized Copernicus Climate and Atmosphere Data Stores.

The Climate (CDS) and Atmosphere (ADS) Data Stores are instances of a common  underlaying infrastructure historically referred as CDS. Data Stores supports the implementation of the Climate Change (C3S) and Atmosphere Monitoring (CAMS) Services under the auspices of Copernicus, the European Union's Earth Observation Programme and entrusted for implementation to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).  Both are highly visible web-based services currently gathering a vibrant community of users, including policymakers, businesses and scientists, helping them to investigate and tackle climate change and atmosphere monitoring challenges.

CDS infrastructure is designed as a distributed system and an open framework which provides web-based and API-based retrieve facilities to a wide and expanding catalogue of datasets, applications and other digital information. It also provides a development platform (Toolbox) which allow the creation of web-based applications operating on the datasets and products available in the catalogue. These applications are subsequently made available to end-users. Infrastructure is hosted in a dedicated in-house Cloud environment.

Having grown at steady rate in terms of users, functionality, workload and available content since their official opening the infrastructure is now looking forward to be further improved in the coming phase of Copernicus driven by the following objectives:

• capitalize operational experience, user feedback, lessons learned and know-how from current Data Stores to move into a modern, more reliable and interoperable platform;
• uptake modernised technologies and standards which have evolved since the initial implementation of the current infrastructure;
• evolve the system architecture as to take full advantage of cloud computing technologies and underlaying cloud infrastructure as containerization.
• embrace open source scientific software and ensure compatibility with state-of-the-art solutions such as machine learning, data cubes and interactive notebooks;
• strengthen synergies with DIAS WEkEO platform and improve the capacity, efficiency, interoperability and reliability of shared interfaces and resources;
• provide improved and flexible access to data and toolbox capabilities from multiple development platforms;

One of the components at the core of this reengineering exercise will be the Toolbox.  The foundation of this future toolbox implementation will be a suite of quality-assured, open source Python libraries for performing scientific analysis and visualisation, ensuring compatibility with a broader range of Python tools already familiar to the scientific community. Implementation will support two different functioning modes. In one hand a toolbox integrated within the Data Store web portal, providing fast and efficient access to catalogued data by taking full advantage of available computation resources and functionalities provided by the in-house Cloud infrastructure. An in the other a standalone version which will allow users to install and run toolbox software locally.

Platforms mentioned above can be accessed here: Climate Data Store (http://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/), Atmosphere Data Store (http://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/ ), DIAS WEkEO (https://www.wekeo.eu/).