A huge dataset that is widely used by the meteorological research community to study extreme rainfall, ice loss and extended droughts in North America, is now freely available on the commercial cloud, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
NCAR has made a significant portion of climate model simulations available to the scientific community via Amazon Web Services (AWS). The data comes from the NCAR Community Earth System Model (CESM) Large Ensemble Numerical Simulation (LENS), which is intended to advance understanding of climate change and variability.
“The scientific community has widely used the CESM LENS data already, but making them accessible from the cloud enables new users to explore research possibilities and computing frontiers,” said Jennifer Kay, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-leader of the CESM LENS project with NCAR scientist Clara Deser.
CESM LENS is a 40-member ensemble of climate simulations from the years 1920 to 2100. The total data volume is large, more than 500 terabytes, which has been and continues to be accessible to download through the NCAR Climate Data Gateway, or for analysis by users who have accounts on the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing facilities.
Of the overall ensemble, NCAR has made approximately 70 terabytes of compressed data freely available on AWS, including the most widely used variables like temperature, precipitation, land surface, and ocean surface.
“This dataset is too large to easily copy. This effort enables both the academic community and private industry who lack access to the NCAR supercomputer to perform data analysis directly in the cloud,” added Jeff de La Beaujardière a division director at NCAR and project manager of this new data accessibility initiative.