The European Weather Cloud, a distributed cloud computing infrastructure of ECMWF and EUMETSAT that provides access to data and other services from the two organizations, became operational on September 26, 2023.
The aim of the European Weather Cloud is to provide a hub for the meteorological community in ECMWF and EUMETSAT member and co-operating states, so that users from many countries and organizations can be brought together to collaborate and share resources.
It allows users to customize and deploy their applications and workflows, as well as build and expose services through the web. Users run applications and services next to where the data is produced, avoiding large data movements over the network.
The basic idea is to bring users to the data instead of transferring vast amounts of data to users. This is becoming even more important as ECMWF moves toward higher-resolution global ensemble forecasts.
Bringing together data holdings from across the entire European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI) in a single federated cloud infrastructure makes it possible to access and process multiple data sets, separately or in combination.
A key characteristic of the European Weather Cloud is that it has a federation capability. This makes it possible for an entity of the EMI, such as an ECMWF member or co-operating state, or a group of such states, to be connected to the European Weather Cloud via the federation interface.
The data holdings or hosted services of this entity would then become discoverable and accessible for use within the rest of the European Weather Cloud. All users from this entity, as well as from others, would be able to integrate the new services and data available as part of their applications and workflows.