About

Service overview

 

The European Weather Cloud: driving weather applications close to data.

The European Weather Cloud is the cloud-based collaboration platform for meteorological application development and operations in Europe enabling the digital transformation of the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI). The EMI comprises ECMWF, EUMETSAT, and the National Meteorological Services of their Member States.

The European Weather Cloud is dedicated to support the National Hydro-meteorological Services of the Member States of both ECMWF and EUMETSAT in fulfilling their official duties and related R&D activities.

As the EMI collects more detailed and frequent weather and climate observations and develops enhanced prediction capabilities and services, it is increasingly facing challenges to provide infrastructure to store, manage and process large datasets.

At the same time, technological progress offers new possibilities to enable harmonized online access to data across large data centres that have been joined together. Working on data in the cloud enables new types of capabilities including running software close to the data, rather than downloading vast amounts of data locally and needing a local infrastructure in support.

The aim is to maximise the value generated by Member State investments, rationalise the usage of data access infrastructure and related developments, and foster new forms of data-driven collaboration across the EMI and users of meteorological data.

For further information and reading it is possible to consult the following list of selected  EWC publications .

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Cloud service structure

The service consists of cloud resources provided by ECMWF and EUMETSAT and controlled by a cloud management platform. Users are given an account (tenancy) and can deploy and manage their virtual resources and application environments to both cloud infrastructures (EUMETSAT and ECMWF).

 

Virtual Environments

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Isolated cloud tenancy

Isolated cloud tenancy 

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Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines

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Block and Object Storage

Block and Object Storage

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Virtual Networking

Virtual Networking

Resources Management

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Blueprints and Instance types

Blueprints and Instance types

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Automation tools

Automation tools

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Monitoring and Reporting

Monitoring and Reporting

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Metering and Accounting Service

Metering and Accounting Service

Support & Collaboration

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Support Portal

Support Portal

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Knowledge Base Documentation

Knowledge Base Documentation

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Discussion Platform

Discussion Platform

 

 

 

 

Want to learn more about the EWC service definition?

Visit our Knowledge Base

 

Data Access

A combined set of retrieval and dissemination services

 

Meteorological Archival and Retrieval System (MARS)

ECMWF Petabytes-scale data archive providing APIs for data discovery and retrieval

ECMWF Production Data Store (ECPDS)

Data dissemination service for customised data delivery

Copernicus Climate and Atmospheric Data Stores (CDS/ADS)

Copernicus Climate Change (C3S) and Atmospheric Monitoring (CAMS) services data

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data access
EUMETSAT Data Store & Data Tailor

Access to all EUMETSAT  meteorological, climate and ocean data through a suite of APIs, and incorporating data tailoring capability

EUMETCast Terrestrial

Near-real time data delivery via terrestrial network

Applications

These are just a few examples of some of the possible EWC real-life applications

Operational systems / production

Automated/systematic production with a specific timeliness

Mass data processing

The essence of the use case is to process a large amount of data

Remote desktops and tools

Remotely accessible desktop machines or websites that specifically support selected training objectives or courses, this providing also tailored tools

Hosted services

Provision of infrastructure to support remotely accessible services for end users, serving data or visualizations

Data exploration and mining - Experimental

Exploring cloud-processing, or experimenting with new technologies or algorithms; exploiting model or satellite data with machine learning / data mining / AI techniques

Collaborative environments

Build an environment that supports specific collaborations with a common environment, data and tools

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