The European Weather Cloud (EWC) – Collaboration Platform for Meteorological Application Development and Data Processing

Abstract

<p>The European Weather Cloud (EWC) is set to be the cloud-based collaboration platform for meteorological application development and operations in Europe and enables the digital transformation of the European Meteorological Infrastructure.</p><p>It consists of cloud infrastructure established by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) but is also open to federation partners with relevant data or infrastructure assets. All resources in EWC are specifically designed to have fast access to the EUMETSAT and ECMWF data holdings.</p><p>Major data accessible by the EWC users is the sum of all online data products available at ECMWF and EUMETSAT, accessible in a seamless manner across the boundaries of their respective cloud infrastructures. Services to access the data include the basic data access services supported by related functions, such as display, reformat, etc., as per the applicable data and service policies and already available at different levels at EUMETSAT and ECMWF. The data offering will be augmented over time based on user needs in line with the aspiration of the EWC driven by meteorological applications development. Where relevant, data federation agreements will be sought with federation partners for third-party data access in line with the basic architecture of the system.</p><p>From a technological viewpoint, EUMETSAT and ECMWF seek to offer services that carry the highest benefits from cloud technology by exploiting the full potential of hosting a given processing function, a project, or a service close to a large variety of readily available data. The hosted services are augmented with the Software Marketplace, which allows EWC users to easily share and use meteorological applications and algorithms.</p><p>The EWC is available for EUMETSAT and ECWMF Member States activities. Resources will also be allocated to research initiatives via specific EUMETSAT Research and Development calls and ECMWF Special Projects, experiments, or investigations of a scientific or technical nature, undertaken by one or more EUMETSAT or ECMWF Member States, likely to be of interest to the general scientific community.</p><p>EWC has reached the end of the pilot phase at the end of 2021 and is currently in 'operational ramp-up'. During the pilot phase, the EWC hosted over 40 different types of use cases containing, for example, data processing, application development, training, and experimenting with cloud technologies. The target is to reach a fully operative state by the end of September 2022. After launching the operational service, EWC looks forward to developing the service towards Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on user feedback.</p>