Baudouin Raoult Head of Data and Services Section SIMDAT Baudouin Raoult Head of Data and Services Section 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

WMO Information System and VGISC The Fourteenth WMO Congress (2003) approved the concept of the WMO Information System (WIS) “a single, co-ordinated global infrastructure for the collection and sharing of information in support of all WMO and related international programmes” The WIS defines three functional components: National Centres (NC) Data Collection or Production Centres (DCPC) Global Information System Centres (GISC) DWD, Météo France and the UK Met Office have volunteered to collaborate on development of a virtual GISC (VGISC) ECMWF and EUMETSAT are included in the project as DCPCs. 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

SIMDAT and the VGISC project SIMDAT is a four-year EU funded project under FP6 SIMDAT was an opportunity to fund to development of the VGISC DWD invited ECMWF to join and take a lead rôle in the SIMDAT project, in order to develop the VGISC. For ECMWF it was an opportunity to develop expertise in GRID technologies. The available budget is approximately 1.1 M€. ECMWF: 84 person/months (2 consultants) DWD: 36 person/months UK Met Office: 6 person/months Météo France: 6 person/months EUMETSAT participates as a non-funded partner. 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

The VGISC architecture Architecture of vgisc, with other wis actors. virtualisation 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

A unique system SIMDAT is a fully decentralised system All sites are true peers and have equal rights Decentralised user and data policies management Integrated catalogue and data retrieval functions (one-stop-shop) Designed for operational use Interfacing with any existing data repositories Without any impact on the local infrastructure or disruption of operational activities Support for any data types (GTS bulletins, Model outputs, Satellite images, climate time-series, ….) There exists similar information systems Most similarities are superficial (e.g. web portal) These system are based on a centralized infrastructure, and dictate how data must be stored at each sites 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Access to existing data repositories in a non-intrusive fashion 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Connectivity to another site via secure connection layer 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

A scalable system: addition of new sites 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Catalogue Synchronisation: each site has a copy of the global catalogue Each site as a copy of the catalogue Each site is its own one-stop-shop 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Data from anywhere can be accessed from everywhere Retrievals Data from anywhere can be accessed from everywaher 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Project successes With the EU With the WMO community The achievements of the meteorological activity of SIMDAT have been acknowledged by EU reviewers With the WMO community The software was presented during expert team meetings Evaluation copies of the software Australia, Canada, China, Finland, Japan, Korea, Morocco, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Zimbabwe Other communities are interested EUMETNET OPERA project Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) International Polar Year (IPY) 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Result achieved 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Status The prototype has been deployed in a large worldwide test bed, allowing users to discover and retrieve a wide variety of data available at 11 sites The software is available under an Open Source Licence that is compatible with commercial applications SIMDAT will follow the development of the INSPIRE directive 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007

Conclusion When the EU project ends in 2008, ECMWF will have no funding to continue with the development. Member States should consider how to capitalise on the results achieved and how best to carry the software forward 67th Council - 28-29 June 2007