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At the national level, in Italy, observational and forecast data are collected by various public bodies and are often kept in various small, heterogeneous and non‐interoperable repositories, released under different licenses, thus limiting the usability for external users. In this context, MISTRAL (the Meteo Italian SupercompuTing PoRtAL) was launched as the first Italian meteorological open data portal, with the aim of promoting the reuse of meteorological data sets available at national level coverage. The MISTRAL portal provides (and archives) meteorological data from various observation networks, both public and private, and forecast data that are generated and post‐processed within the Consortium for Small‐scale Modeling‐Limited Area Model Italia (COSMO‐LAMI) agreement using high performance computing (HPC) facilities. Also incorporated is the Italy Flash Flood use case, implemented with the collaboration of European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which exploits cutting edge advances in HPC‐based post‐processing of ensemble precipitation forecasts, for different model resolutions, and applies those to deliver novel blended‐resolution forecasts specifically for Italy. Finally, in addition to providing architectures for the acquisition and display of observational data, MISTRAL also delivers an interactive system for visualizing forecast data of different resolutions as superimposed multi‐layer maps.

The Human Brain Project (HBP) (https://humanbrainproject.eu/) is a large-scale flagship project funded by the European Commission with the goal of establishing a research infrastructure for brain science. This research infrastructure is currently being realised and will be called EBRAINS (https://ebrains.eu/). The wide ranging EBRAINS services for the brain research communities require diverse access, processing and storage capabilities. As a result, it will strongly rely on e-infrastructure services. The HBP led to the creation of Fenix (https://fenix-ri.eu/), a collaboration of five European supercomputing centres, who are providing a set of federated e-infrastructure services to EBRAINS. The Fenix architecture has been designed to uniquely address the need for a wide spectrum of services, from high performance computing (HPC) to on-demand cloud technologies to identity and access federation, for facilitating ease of access and usage of distributed e-infrastructure resources. In this article we describe the underlying concepts for an audience of computational science end-users and developers of domain-specific applications, workflows and platforms services. To exemplify the use of Fenix, we will discuss selected use cases demonstrating how brain researchers can use the offered infrastructure services and describe how access to these resources can be obtained.

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<p>Italy and Germany are establishing a new bilateral cooperation in meteorology, climatology and related disciplines that will create a hub of excellence for cutting edge research and translate the findings into improving operational services and university education. The joint research and education network IDEA-S4S will harness expertise of universities, research institutes and operational services in both countries and foster scientific exchange and collaboration to improve weather, climate and environmental services.</p><p>Within the new programme, the core areas of scientific expertise of both countries will be systematically brought together, activities will be streamlined and extended beyond basic research collaboration to form a holistic IDEA-S4S network of weather and climate science and education, extending from qualification of graduates to support for early career researchers to networking of senior scientists. The programme will cooperate with WMO and the European Meteorological Infrastructure (ECMWF, EUMETSAT, EUMETNET) and strengthen the scientific environment for the ECMWF sites in Bonn and Bologna. A Joint Steering Committee will oversee the cooperation and guide the overall scientific and strategic direction of the programme.</p><p>Through four-year funding periods, the network aims to make substantial progress in seamless high-resolution probabilistic Earth system prediction, employing state-of-the-art observing systems and Earth system models. This requires improved understanding and application of coupled processes between the components of the Earth system (including atmosphere-ocean-ice-land-vegetation-rivers) as well as between the impacts of human activities and the Earth system. Such complex weather and climate prediction systems place high demands on high-performance computing infrastructure, generate extremely large data volumes and need to integrate observations seamlessly into the models.</p><p>In this contribution, we will present the concept and roadmap of the IDEA-S4S network, which will focus on improving seamless weather and climate forecasts, in particular for high impact events such as floods and droughts. Both countries have experienced devastating impacts of such extreme events with unusual rainfall intensities, some of which even lead to the destruction of entire regions. Better understanding the complex structure and the numerous feedback processes in such events will improve the prediction of future events in support of a better prepared and resilient society.</p>