The Climate Mill, an infrastructure for processing climate data

The societal needs for updated and downscaled climate projections for adaptation action are well documented. These needs range from key information and recommendations, such as fact sheets targeted at municipalities, to geographic information and even access to the full datasets of climate projections. 

All the while the climate research community is producing global and regional projections of increasingly higher quality. More and more national climate service instances produce further downscaled and bias-adjusted national projections, sometimes even separate hydrological projections, to produce more locally relevant information. 

The sheer amounts of data are enormous and require significant capacity for storage and data transfer. This leads to climate and climate impact scientists spending a significant amount of time handling the data, and this effort is often duplicated even in the office next door.

To alleviate this problem, the Norwegian government has granted MET Norway a project to create an integrated infrastructure for storing, processing, and distribution of downscaled and bias-corrected climate projections. This infrastructure, and the project, is called the Climate Mill, Klimakverna in Norwegian. The project has a 4 year timeframe, starting 2023 with planning and mapping of technologies. One of the keystones in the Climate Mill is FAIR metadata that follows the data through the entire process. This metadata will ensure compatibility with  Geonorge, a national portal for geodata, thus simplifying the distribution. The infrastructure will rely on existing technologies including cloud solutions for storage and processing. With this we aim to make climate projections easier to produce, and ultimately easier to use for adaptation purposes.