ECMWF hosted the second EarthServer-2 project meeting on 8 and 9 October 2015. Funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, EarthServer-2 aims to offer improved access to Big Earth Data through established web service standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
“Based on rasdaman, a leading array database technology, the project will transform the way Earth system scientists access and process data,” says Julia Wagemann of ECMWF. One of the ways it aims to do this is by enhancing existing data archives with flexible, scalable query functionality.
ECMWF is one of five service partners who will each make available up to 1 petabyte of Earth science data, from fields ranging from climate science and Earth observation to the marine and planetary sciences.
As a climate science partner in the project, ECMWF aims to make reanalysis datasets stored in its MARS archive accessible for users in a more dynamic and on-demand way. These datasets are aimed at the meteorological community, at operators of satellite services for calibration and verification, and at other users of climate data, such as local governments.
The second project meeting at ECMWF served mainly to set up a common roadmap for the coming year for each of the six work packages. This includes setting up some pilot services to explore the possibilities of the new interfaces. It also gave staff from ECMWF the opportunity to meet the wider project team and discuss ECMWF’s contribution in more detail.
“One highlight was a tour of ECMWF's computer hall that gave external project partners the chance to see the challenges ECMWF faces as the largest data centre in the project,” says Julia Wagemann. “Goals for the upcoming year are set and a great deal of work lies ahead of all project members in order to make agile Big Earth Data analytics possible.”
The international project consortium led by Jacobs University Bremen includes ECMWF, rasdaman GmbH, Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), MEEO s.r.l., CITE, NCI Australia and NASA. EarthServer-2 started in May 2015 and has a duration of 36 months.
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