<p><span>The talk describes ongoing efforts to create digital replicas of the Earth as part of the the European Commission's Destination Earth programme.</span></p><p><span>Global, coupled storm-resolving simulations are feasible and can contribute to building such information systems and are no longer a dream thanks to recent advances in Earth system modelling, supercomputing and the adaptation of weather and climate codes for novel computing architectures. Such simulations for example explicitly represent essential climate processes, such as deep convection and mesoscale ocean eddies, that today need to be parametrised even at the highest resolution used in global weather and climate information production. These simulations, combined with novel data-driven deep learning advances, thus offer a window into the future, with a promise to significantly increase the realism of Earth system information. Despite the significant compute and data challenges, there is a real prospect to better support global to local climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, and complement the existing information derived with today's operational simulations in the range of 10-100 km.</span></p><p><span>Digital Twins of Earth thus encapsulate both the latest science as well as technology advances to provide near-real time information on Extremes and climate change in a wider digital environment. Here users can interact, modify and ultimately create their own tailored information. This is facilitated through complex workflows managed by ECMWF's digital twin engine that closely connects EuroHPC resources for the production of digital twin data, manages diverse data access patterns through cloud-based ancilliary systems such as Eumetsat's Data Lake, and provides a diverse range of tools to faciliate user interaction and data-driven applications creating new information through ESA's user service platform. The underlying system architecture and design choices will be described and justified.</span></p>

<p>The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) together with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) have worked together to offer to their Member States a new paradigm to access and consume weather data and services. The “European Weather Cloud-(EWC)” (https://www.europeanweather.cloud/), concluded its pilot phase and is expected to become operational during the first months of 2023.</p> <p>This initiative aims to offer a <strong>community cloud infrastructure</strong> on which Member and Co‐operating States of both organizations can create on demand virtual compute (including GPUs) and storage resources to gain easy and high throughput access to the ECMWF’s Numerical Weather Predication (NWP) and EUMETSAT’s satellite data in a timely and configurable fashion. Moreover, one of the main goals is to involve more National Meteorological Services to jointly form a federation of clouds/data offered from their Member States, for the maximum benefit of the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI). During the pilot phase of the project, both organizations have jointly hosted user and technical workshops to actively engage with the meteorological community and align the evolution of the EWC to reflect and satisfy their operational goals and needs.</p> <p>The EWC, in its pilot phase hosted several use cases, mostly aimed at users in the developers’ own organisations. These broad categories of these cases are:</p> <ul> <li>Web services to explore hosted datasets</li> <li>Data processing applications</li> <li>Platforms to support the training of machine learning models on archive datasets</li> <li>Workshops and training courses (e.g., ICON model training, ECMWF training etc)</li> <li>Research in collaboration with external partners</li> <li>World Meteorological Organization (WMO) support with pilots and PoC.</li> </ul> <p>Some examples of the use cases currently developed at the EWC are:</p> <ul> <li>The German weather service DWD, which is already feeding maps generated by a server it deployed on the cloud into its public GeoPortal service.</li> <li>EUMETSAT and ECMWF joint use case assesses bias correction schemes for the assimilation of radiance data based on several satellite data time series</li> <li>the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) hosts a climate explorer web application based on KNMI climate explorer data and ECMWF weather and climate reanalyses</li> <li>The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium prepares ECMWF forecast data for use in a local atmospheric dispersion model.</li> <li>NordSat, a collaboration of northern European countries which is developing and testing imagery generation tools in preparation for the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite products.</li> <li>UK Met Office with the DataProximateCompute use case, which distributes compute workload close to data, with the automatic creation and disposal of Dask clusters, as well as the data plane VPN network, on demand and in heterogeneous cloud environments.</li> </ul> <p>In this presentation, the status of the project, the offered services and how these are accessed by the end users along with examples of the existing use cases will be analysed. The plans, next steps for the evolution of the EWC and its relationship with other projects and initiatives (like DestinE) will conclude the presentation.</p>

<p>Since 2019, ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) together with EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) initiated a project named “<strong>European Weather Cloud</strong>” (https://www.europeanweather.cloud/) expected to become operational in 2022. The strategic goal of this initiative is to build and offer a <strong>community cloud infrastructure</strong> on which Member and Co‐operating States of both organizations can create and manage on demand virtual resources enabling access to the ECMWF’s Numerical Weather Predication (NWP) products and EUMETSAT’s satellite data in a timely, efficient, and configurable fashion. Moreover, one of the main goals is to involve more entities in this initiative in a joint effort to form a federation of clouds/data offered from our Member States, for the maximum benefit of the European Meteorological Infrastructure.</p><p>During the current pilot phase of the project several use cases have been defined, mostly aimed at service developers own organisations. These broad categories of use cases are:</p><ul><li>Web services exploring hosted datasets.</li> <li>Infrastructure allowing the running of an atmospheric dispersion model on ECMWF forecast data.</li> <li>Platform to support the training of machine learning models on archive datasets.</li> <li>Platform to support workshops and training courses (DWD/ICON model training, various ECMWF training courses)</li> <li>Environment facilitating research in collaboration with external partners.</li> </ul><p>Some examples of the use cases currently developed at the European Weather Cloud are:</p><ul><li>The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium prepares ECMWF forecast data for use in a local atmospheric dispersion model.</li> <li>The German weather service, which is already feeding maps generated by a server it deployed on the cloud into its public GeoPortal service.</li> <li>The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute hosts a climate explorer web application based on KNMI climate explorer data and ECMWF weather and climate reanalyses.</li> <li>EUMETSAT Numerical Weather Prediction Satellite Application Facility (NWP SAF) develops a training module will develop a training module for a fast radiative transfer model (RTTOV) based on ERA5 reanalysis data.</li> <li>EUMETSAT and ECMWF joint use case assess bias correction schemes for the assimilation of radiance data based on several satellite data time series.</li> </ul><p>During the current pilot phase of the project, both organizations have organised user and technical workshops to actively engage with the meteorological community to align the evolution of the European Weather Cloud to reflect and satisfy their goals and needs.</p><p>In this presentation, the status of the project will be analysed describing the existing infrastructure, the offered services and how these are accessed by the end-users along with examples of the existing use cases. The plans, next steps for the evolution and the transition to operations of the European Weather Cloud and its relationship with other projects and initiatives will conclude the presentation.</p>

<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>

<p>The project “South-East European Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory System” (SEE-MHEWS-A) is a collaborative effort to strengthen the existing early warning capacity in south-eastern Europe. The project was initiated in 2016 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and has been supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), World Bank and the European Commission and has now developed from a concept into implementation of a pilot for a multi-hazard forecasting system. The pilot consists of four limited area numerical weather prediction models which are used as forcing to three hydrological models. In the implementation phase the hydrological models are setup over small catchments, but the plan is to increase the coverage when the project moves to the operationalization phase. The pilot also consists of a nowcasting system and the output are visualized on a web-based common information platform. The project has led the countries in the region to increase sharing of observational data, knowledge and resources to create a common information platform that can potentially deliver a tailored decision support system for hydrometeorological hazards to agencies and authorities.</p>