BACI: 2015-2019

TOWARDS A BIOSPHERE ATMOSPHERE CHANGE INDEX

STFC Science and Technology Facilities Council - Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA)

The Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC, is the public sector research organisation whose role is to provide access to large scale scientific facilities for researchers in the UK. Within STFC, the Centre for Environmental Data Archival, based within the RAL Space department of the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, hosts a range of activities associated with environmental data archives.

These activities include running a number of key environmental data centers for the environmental research community including the National Centre for Earth Observation Data Centre. In addition to being in the vanguard of the development of data archival and delivery practices and technologies CEDA manages JASMIN CEMS services. These services provide new ways for scientists to collaborate in self-managing group workspaces, enabling models and algorithms to be evaluated alongside curated archive data, and for data to be shared and evaluated before being deposited in the permanent archive.

OUR ROLE IN BACI

JASMIN-CEMS (facility for Climate and Environmental Monitoring from Space) Computing Infrastructure: The CEMS data and computing infrastructure that will be used in this project is integrated with the JASMIN infrastructure deployed in STFC-RAL. (see e.g. doi:10.1109/BigData.2013.6691556). The JASMIN-CEMS services to be used in this project include Group Workspaces (a large collaborative “workspace” made up of high-performance disk), Dedicated Virtual Machines (virtual machines which can be built with specific software required by the project, with access restricted to members of the project consortium), Access to Lotus (large high-performance computing cluster suitable for larger processing and analysis tasks). Additionally, JASMIN/CEMS provides co-location with a number of other important data sets to be used in the project, and the CEDA archives for long-term data curation.

KEY PEOPLE