Big Data and the Climate/Environment domain (vis-a-vis the respective H2020 Societal Challenge) - Opportunities, Challenges and Requirements. As presented and discussed in the public launch of the BigDataEurope project.

1. BIG DATA &
CLIMATE CHANGE
Opportunities, Challenges and
Requirements
27/02/2015

2. Climate Change Research
 Climate research investigates global climatic
changes
o taking into account:
 natural forcing
 anthropogenic forcing
 interaction with composition of the atmosphere
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

3. Climate Change Research: Why?
 To investigate whether there is climatic change due to
man activities
 To forecast the magnitude of the climatic change
 To forecast impacts of climate change on:
o economy
o environment (e.g., changes of land use, availability of
water resources, rise of sea level)
o health
o on a global as well as on local scale
 To increase resilience, mitigate effects, reduce causing
factors
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

4. Climate Change Research: How?
 Computer models that simulate the earth’s
climate
o For time periods spanning several decades
o Taking into account different scenarios of world-
wide anthropogenic pollutants emissions
o Assimilating very large number of current and
past weather observations
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

5. Climate Change vis-à-vis Big Data
 How is climate change research connected
to Big Data?
o computer models discretize the entire earth’s
surface to a resolution of a few kilometres 
billions of grid cells
o world-wide weather observations and satellite
data are collected and assimilated on a daily
basis
o repeated simulations and long time periods
(decades) of simulations
 All of the above produce and manipulate
massive amounts of data
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

6.  Management and manipulation of climate
model simulation results is a Big Data
challenge and involves techniques and tools
for
o Storage
o Analysis
o Visualisation
o Combination of climate models results with data
from other areas, e.g., agricultural production,
population distribution, economic activities …
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015
Big Data issues in Climate Change
Research

7. Big Data and Climate Model Results
 Big Data management and analytics of global
climate model results – examples of potential
pilot cases:
o Prediction of frequency and intensity of extreme
weather events
o Prediction of frequency and intensity of flooding
events
o Prediction of rise of sea level
 Strengthening of resilience against the above
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

8. Big Data and Climate Model Results
 Big Data management and analytics of global
climate model results – more examples of
potential pilot cases:
o Effects on agricultural production on local scale
o Effects on economic activities
o Effects on forest fires frequency and intensity
o Visualization techniques of big data can help
towards increasing people awareness of climate
change effects in the local scale
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

9. Organisations engaged in climate
change research
 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), http://www.ipcc.ch
o Data Distribution Centre (DDC)
 Climate (observations and model results), socio-economic and
environmental data (past and future scenarios)
http://www.ipcc-data.org/
o DDC is jointly managed by
 British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC), UK,
http://badc.nerc.ac.uk
 CSU World Data Center Climate (WDCC), Germany
http://www.dkrz.de/daten/wdcc
 Center for International Earth Science Information Network
(CIESIN), Columbia University, New York, USA,
http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

10. Organisations engaged in climate
change research
 National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), USA
o Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS),
http://www.giss.nasa.gov
GISS climate model
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp
o The Global Change Master Directory
 List of atmosphere and climate data Websites in the
USA
http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/learn/pointers/meteo.html
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

11. Organisations engaged in climate
change research
 Divisions of National Meteorological Services,
e.g.,
o Meteo France
 Climate and Large scale Meteorology Department
(GMGEC, Toulouse),
http://www.cnrm-
game.fr/spip.php?rubrique89&lang=en
o German Weather Service (Deutscher
Wetterdienst - DWD)
 Integrated Climate Data Centre (ICDC),
http://icdc.zmaw.de
 Climate Data Centre (CDC), http://www.dwd.de/cdcBigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

12. Organisations engaged in climate
change research
 Research centres, e.g.,
o German Research Centre for Climate – Deutches
Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) http://www.dkrz.de/
hosting
 World Data Center for Climate (WDCC) http://cera-
www.dkrz.de
 Climate and Environmental Retrieval and Archive
(CERA), http://www.dkrz.de/daten-en/cera/portal
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

13. Organisations engaged in climate
change research
 Center for International Climate and
Environmental Research (CICERO), Oslo,
Norway
http://www.cicero.uio.no/home/index_e.aspx
 National Observatory of Athens, Institute for
Environmental Research and Sustainable
Development, Athens, Greece
http://www.meteo.noa.gr/research_area_03.ht
ml
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

14. Organisations engaged in climate
change research
 United Nations
o Big Data Climate Challenge
http://www.UNglobalpulse.org/big-data-climate
 recent initiative
 aiming to bring forward current evidence of the
economic dimensions of climate change around the
world using Big Data and analytics
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

15. Additional sources for climate
model data
 WCRP* CMIP3** Multi-Model Dataset Archive
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php
*World Climate Research Program
**Coupled Models Intercomparison Project, Phase
3
o Open and free for non-commercial purposes after
registering and agreeing to the "terms of use“
o As of January 2007 more than 35 terabytes of
data were in the archive
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

16. Additional sources for climate
models data
 Earth System Grid Federation ESGF
o Worldwide federation for climate data with data nodes
in Europe, USA, Canada, China, Japan and Australia.
Registration and data download are free of charge.
Most data are also accessible for other purposes than
research, even for commercial use http://esgf-
data.dkrz.de/esgf-web-fe/
 IS-ENES - Infrastructure for the European
Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES)
o climate data are provided by the distributed data
centers within the ENES data federation
https://verc.enes.org/dataBigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015

17. Additional sources for climate
models data
 KomFor
o Research data from the Earth system sciences
provided by the WDC Cluster Earth System
Research: http://www.komfor.net/data-portal.html
 EUDAT - European Data Infrastructure
o Data objects and collections from various disciplines
http://b2find.eudat.eu
 C3-Grid
o access to various climate data centers in Germany
https://c3portal.awi.de/home
https://verc.enes.org/c3web
BigDataEurope Launch Event, Brussels, 27/2/2015