Climate Data Analysis: Enhancing Usage of Research Data with Climate4impact, EUDAT and DARE

Researchers using climate data are facing challenge to analyze the data they need. Data volumes are increasing very rapidly, and the ability to download all needed data is often not a possibility anymore. A platform called climate4impact (C4I) has been designed and developed to enhance the use of research data, to support researchers with analytics and to support other climate portals. It is currently under development within the European Project IS-ENES3 and builds on previous developments from previous IS-ENES projects, CLIPC and C3S-Magic. C4I offers a front-end and standard services (with APIs) on top of the climate data infrastructure, and it can be visited at https://climate4impact.eu. The current version provides processing services include climate indicator calculations, country based statistics and polygon extraction. C4I makes use of the DKRZ Birdhouse framework, which is an extendable and modular processing framework based on PyWPS. Data is obtained from various ESGF nodes using secure OpenDAP. C4I provides a personal basket where users can upload their own data and do research with the provided tools. The software is open, reusable, modular and packaged. Components are available via docker containers to enable easy re-use. The on-demand calculations are taking place on the front-end server, and this is not scalable and can lead to performance problems. Within the DARE project, delegation of the calculations on the DARE Platform using the DARE API has been implemented and tested in a prototype, using EUDAT B2DROP as an intermediate storage service. It is to be noted that the DARE Platform as well as the EUDAT B2 Services should be interoperable with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This prototype service delegation will be made operational during the upcoming year. In the IS-ENES3 project, the web portal will be redesigned with a completely new architecture using a micro-services and containerized approach, building on experience gained during the previous projects. The next version of the portal will be built using the React framework, which allows for creating large web applications which can change data, without reloading the page. We are actively seeking input from current as well as potential users at this time, to make the next version of C4I useful to as many people as possible. The material presented here is made possible because the IS-ENES3 project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N°824084.