Copernicus Climate Data Store
The Technology Achievement Award 2019 was presented to the team at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Union, who developed the Climate Data Store.
This award recognises that the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS) is empowering a wide range of user communities worldwide to work on addressing climate change – the most challenging environmental phenomenon worldwide of modern times – and allowing the development of services to help mitigate its impacts. The CDS has been operational for less than a year and has already attracted well over ten thousand users world-wide. The citation for the award is:
“The Copernicus Climate Change Service’s Climate Data Store supports climate services in Europe by providing seamless access to high-quality climate datasets, past, present and future.”
The CDS is an operational service of C3S, and is used for monitoring the earth’s environment. It provides a one-stop shop for climate information including satellite, in situ and modelling information. The CDS is not only for experts; any user can freely browse the data. In addition to the data, the CDS includes a software Toolbox which allows users to process the data online in order to analyse, monitor and help to predict the effects of climate change.
The CDS provides a consistent and harmonised way of exploring quality-controlled data, even if they come from different sources. A web-based, programming-language-agnostic API allows users to automate their interactions with the CDS. The CDS is a cutting-edge, responsive and scalable cloud-based system that offers high-speed access to massive volumes of data, scaling elastically to meet users’ demand. As an operational system, it provides a dedicated user support team, who help CDS users with the system and provide feedback to the development team to help them plan future strategic upgrades.
The Climate Data Store, developed, operated and managed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union, was launched on 14 June 2018. It is a one-stop shop for past, present and future climate information. It freely offers a wide range of high-quality climate datasets, together with a software Toolbox allowing users the option to process the data online. The CDS supports European and worldwide researchers, scientists, consultants in their research, planning and decision making. Since its release, an increasing number of users have registered into the CDS and make use of it. It can be accessed at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/
