The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) recently released the Climate Data Store (CDS) — an innovative infrastructure containing core information about Earth’s climate. A large variety of data is stored in the CDS, such as in-situ observations, processed historical satellite data, and output from climate models, including projections.
The CDS is not only for experts. Any user can browse the data using the search function. For experts and developers of applications though there is an extra level to the CDS, a software toolbox, within which data can be processed in order to analyse, monitor and help to predict the effects of climate change.
What is the Climate Data Store Toolbox?
The CDS Toolbox contains a comprehensive set of software tools that can perform basic and complex mathematical operations on the data, such as statistical computations. All tools are described in detail in the Toolbox catalogue, which is available from the CDS website. The Toolbox itself is accessible via a straightforward web interface.
Software developers at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which runs C3S on behalf of the European Commission, created the CDS Toolbox so that users can easily process and visualise data. Before its existence, someone wanting to analyse information about Earth’s climate would often have to download vast amounts of data, requiring a lot of time and computer storage space.
How does the CDS Toolbox work?
Where possible, the user sees only the output of the data processing and visualisation operations, which typically takes the form of tables, maps and graphs. The user can then selectively analyse or download the final processed output rather than all the original data.
Different tools can also be combined to create more sophisticated workflows that perform complex calculations to analyse, monitor and predict the status of various climate factors for a selected range of dates or geographical area of interest. In addition, the CDS Toolbox also allows expert users to create their own applications.
“Although software toolboxes are not a new idea, the CDS Toolbox is very complete and innovative,” explains Gionata Biavati, C3S Data analyst at ECMWF. “It contains many tools and a powerful interface allowing users with a wide range of experience in analysing data to interact with information about Earth’s climate.”
What’s next for the CDS Toolbox?
The development of new tools and maintenance of existing ones is important for C3S. The CDS infrastructure will expand as the number of users it serves and datasets it contains increases. One exciting enhancement will be that, later this year, user-made applications will be shareable and it will be possible to develop applications in a multi-user way.
Eventually, C3S hopes to let users upload their own data and use this with the Toolbox workflows.
“This feature, together with an interface to the CDS that allows integration of the online tools, will be another tiny revolution towards affordable cloud computing,” continues Biavati.
Using such a toolbox to analyse climate data is an important starting point. The potential that comes from this type of computing is incredible, and it is possible that similar applications will be developed in other private and public systems, following the lead of C3S.
“We are widely disseminating information and applications that will help users to predict and mitigate the effects of climate change. And anybody is able to access the CDS for free and use all the tools we have to offer,” Biavati concludes.