The European Weather Cloud

Supporting training

The EWC is highly valuable as a collaboration platform on which training courses can be run. One benefit is that it enables ECMWF and EUMETSAT member states to run training sessions with a larger number of participants than would be possible in a physical classroom. For example, by using the EWC, a training course that would have previously been limited to ten seats could have the increased capacity of 100 participants.

Partly driven by COVID-related lockdowns, ECMWF has moved to virtual or hybrid training. In this scenario, it has been demonstrated that the EWC can provide support for the practical and hands-on sessions through virtual classrooms. The flexibility of the system means that member states can also use the EWC as an infrastructure to run their own training.

EUMETSAT also runs virtual courses using the EWC, through which participants can more easily practise using EUMETSAT data by accessing virtual machines – computers with faster processing power, and more memory and storage than they would normally have access to. During the training courses for meteorologists as part of its International Summer School 2022, EUMETSAT provided ten virtual machines in the EWC. In addition, participants used virtual machines to access and run Jupyter notebooks, enabling them to display data from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites quickly and easily.

The German Meteorological Service, Deutscher Wetterdienst, used the EWC during the 2020 edition of its training course on the ICON model – the German weather forecast model. Using the EWC made the practical part of the training session, when the numerous participants used the model themselves to forecast the weather and put into practice what they had learned during the lectures, go more smoothly.

Central creation of a set of satellite images

The national meteorological and hydrological services in Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which together form the Nordsat collaboration, use the EWC to centrally generate a set of satellite images they can all access.

Before the EWC, each country needed to expend resources transferring EUMETSAT satellite data – including from Meteosat Third Generation and EUMETSAT Polar System - Second Generation satellites – and then creating images using local infrastructure. Now, using the EWC, they can collaborate to create one set of satellite images that they can all use and access directly.

Aiding climate studies

Researchers from the Laboratory of Space, Geophysics, and Oceanographic Studies (LEGOS), based at the Midi-Pyrénées Observatory in Toulouse, France, use the EWC to access climate-quality Meteosat data quickly and easily. Looking to better understand the climate in the tropics, LEGOS researchers use images from Meteosat satellites to study a weather phenomenon known as mesoscale convective systems, collections of storms that contribute to extreme precipitation in the tropics.

Without a cloud computing platform, accessing Meteosat climate data records stored at EUMETSAT - which span more than 40 years - would have taken LEGOS researchers months to download. And processing and storing the data would have required far more computing facilities and capacity than they had available. Using the EWC, LEGOS researchers are able to access an enormous quantity of data directly, without the need to download, process, or store them themselves, enabling the scientists to carry out studies that include a research collaboration with EUMETSAT to gain deeper insight into climate processes.

Fiolleau, T. and R. Roca, 2013: An Algorithm for the Detection and Tracking of Tropical Mesoscale Convective Systems Using Infrared Images From Geostationary Satellite, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., vol. 51, no. 7, pp. 4302–4315. doi:  10.1109/TGRS.2012.2227762