Short Description of Projects

ENSEMBLES 2004-2009 (FP6)

ENSEMBLE-based Predictions of Climate Changes and their Impacts

Coord: Met Office (UK), Paul van der Linden and John Mitchell

Project description: The ENSEMBLES project has been supported by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme as a 5 year Integrated Project from 2004-2009 under the Thematic Sub-Priority “Global Change and Ecosystems”. About 70 European and International institutions joined efforts to:

  • Develop an ensemble prediction system for climate change based on the principal state-of-the-art, high resolution, global and regional Earth System models developed in Europe, validated against quality controlled, high resolution gridded datasets for Europe, to produce for the first time, an objective probabilistic estimate of uncertainty in future climate at the seasonal to decadal and longer timescales
  • Quantify and reduce the uncertainty in the representation of physical, chemical, biological and human-related feedbacks in the Earth System (including water resource, land use, and air quality issues, and carbon cycle feedbacks)

  • Maximise the exploitation of the results by linking the outputs of the ensemble prediction system to a range of applications, including agriculture, health, food security, energy, water resources, insurance and weather risk management

  • FP6 contract: GOCE-CT-2003-505539
  • 68 partners
  • ENSEMBLES final report: https://ensembles-eu.metoffice.gov.uk/docs/Ensembles_final_report_Nov09.pdf

COMBINE (05/2009 – 10/2013)

Comprehensive Modelling of the Earth system for better climate prediction and projection

Coord: MPG (DE), Marco Giorgetta and Elisa Manzini

Project description: The European integrating FP7 project COMBINE brings together research groups to advance Earth system models (ESMs) for more accurate climate projections and for reduced uncertainty in the prediction of climate and climate change in the next decades. COMBINE will contribute to better assessments of changes in the physical climate system and of their impacts in the societal and economic system. The proposed work will strengthen the scientific base for environmental policies of the EU for the climate negotiations, and will provide input to the IPCC/AR5 process.

COMBINE proposes to improve ESMs by including key physical and biogeochemical processes to model more accurately the forcing mechanisms and the feedbacks determining the magnitude of climate change in the 21st century. For this purpose the project will incorporate carbon and nitrogen cycle, aerosols coupled to cloud microphysics and chemistry, proper stratospheric dynamics and increased resolution, ice sheets and permafrost in current Earth system models. COMBINE also proposes to improve initialization techniques to make the best possible use of observation-based analyses of ocean and ice to benefit from the predictability of the climate system in predictions of the climate of the next few decades.

Combining more realistic models and skillful initialization is expected to reduce the uncertainty in climate projections. Resulting effects will be investigated in the physical climate system and in impacts on water availability and agriculture, globally and in 3 regions under the influence of different climate feedback mechanisms. Results from the comprehensive ESMs will be used in an integrated assessment model to test the underlying assumptions in the scenarios, and hence to contribute to improved scenarios.

COMBINE will make use of the experimental design and of the scenarios proposed for IPCC AR5. Therefore the project will be able to contribute to the AR5, by its relevant research and by the contribution of experiments to the IPCC data archives.

EUCLIPSE (02/2010 – 07/2014)

European Union Cloud intercomparison, process study and evaluation project

Coord: KNMI (NL), Pier Siebesma

The central objective of the FP7 EUCLIPSE project is to reduce the uncertainty in the representation of cloud processes and feedbacks in the new generation of Earth System Models (ESMs), in support of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report. Novel, process-oriented evaluations of clouds in present-day and future climate simulations made by the leading European ESMs will identify the cloud types and processes responsible for the spread in climate sensitivity and future precipitation changes across the models, and for deficiencies in the simulation of the present-day climate. The new diagnostics and metrics developed in EUCLIPSE will inform targeted sensitivity experiments to isolate the processes responsible for cloud feedback uncertainty.

In EUCLIPSE, four distinct communities will work together across a set of integrated work packages over a four-year period: the observational community will provide state-of-the-art measurements from ground- and space-based active and passive remote sensing; the numerical weather prediction community will provide analyses of short timescale model biases induced by cloud processes; the cloud modeling community will provide fine-scale models as an additional tool for understanding cloud behavior in a changing climate; finally, the climate modeling community will synthesize the physical understanding and observational constraints identified by the other communities to improve the representation and assessment of cloud processes in ESMs and so improve the predictive skill of ESMs.

SPECS (11/2012 – 01/2017)

Seasonal-to-decadal climate prediction for the improvement of climate services

Coord: BSC (ES), Francisco Doblas-Reyes

Project description: SPECS will undertake research and dissemination activities to deliver a new generation of European climate forecast systems, with improved forecast quality and efficient regionalisation tools to produce reliable, local climate information over land at seasonal-to-decadal time scales, and provide an enhanced communication protocol and services to satisfy the climate information needs of a wide range of public and private stakeholders.

The improved understanding and seamless predictions will offer better estimates of the future frequency of high-impact, extreme climatic events and of the prediction uncertainty. New services to convey climate information and its quality will be used.

SPECS will be, among other things, the glue to coalesce the outcome of previous research efforts that hardly took climate prediction into account. It will ensure interoperability so as to easily incorporate their application in an operational context, provide the basis for improving the capacity of European policy making, industry and society to adapt to near-future climate variations and a coordinated response to some of the GFCS components.

EMBRACE (11/2011 – 02/2016)

Earth system Model Bias Reduction and assessing Abrupt Climate change project

Coord: SMHI (SE), Colin Jones

Project description: EMBRACE brings together the leading Earth System Models (ESMs) in Europe around a common set of objectives to improve our ability to (i) simulate the Earth System and (ii) make reliable projections of future global change. EMBRACE builds on the existing European collaboration network in Earth System Modelling and will be the main European input to international efforts in this field over the coming 5 years. The project has a number of key goals; (i) to reduce the main, known biases in existing European ESMs, (ii) to fully evaluate ESM simulation capabilities and improvements made in the project, (iii) to increase the realism of, and interactions between, the physical and biogeochemical components of ESMs, (iv) to assess the risks of abrupt or irreversible changes in key components of the Earth system, in response to the most recent greenhouse gas, aerosol and land-use scenarios proposed for the IPCC AR5. The primary ESM biases targeted for improvement include, (i) the representation of moist atmospheric convection and links to coupled tropical variability and precipitation. (ii) equatorial and coastal ocean upwelling and their impact on the global climate system and carbon cycle, (iii) coupled processes controlling physical and biogeochemical mixing in the Southern ocean, (iv) soil hydrology and its coupling with the atmosphere and (v) the terrestrial carbon cycle, through a more realistic treatment of climate-vegetation interaction. Improvements will be evaluated in the context of the full range of CMIP5 historical simulations, with the CMIP5 protocol forming the basis for future climate projections made to assess the risk of abrupt changes. A cross-cutting theme will be the impact of improved process description, combined with increased coupled model resolution, in reducing ESM biases and improving their reliability of future projections.

PRIMAVERA (11/2015 – 11/2019)

PRocess-based climate sIMulation: AdVances in high resolution modelling and European climate Risk Assessment

Coord: Met Office (UK)

PRIMAVERA is a European Union Horizon2020 project which aims to develop a new generation of advanced and well-evaluated high-resolution global climate models, capable of simulating and predicting regional climate with unprecedented fidelity, for the benefit of governments, business and society in general.

The concept of model fidelity is central to PRIMAVERA, and its foundations are in process understanding. It is clear that many of the most pressing questions about regional climate change urgently require advances in process simulation. For example, to what extent are recent heat waves, floods and droughts in Europe attributable to natural variability or human influences on the global climate system? How will the risk of such high impact events change over the next few decades and beyond? The extent to which it is possible to provide robust answers to these questions relies fundamentally on the fidelity of the climate models that are used to address them. However, fidelity is insufficient in itself: we must be able to justify why a particular model produces a particular prediction at the process level.

Many years of experience, first in numerical weather prediction and, equally albeit only recently, in climate simulation, have demonstrated that advances in the explicit simulation of key processes are essential to achieving sustained progress and to provide robust answers. High-resolution has been identified as one essential element of the development of GCMs to reproduce key climate processes with higher fidelity than conventional GCMs, thus enabling detailed process understanding.

CRESCENDO (11/2015 – 03/2021)

Coordinated Research in Earth Systems and Climate: Experiments, Knowledge, Dissemination and Outreach

Coord: University of Leeds (UK), Colin Jones

Project summary CRESCENDO brings together seven Earth System Modelling (ESM) groups with three Integrated Assessment Modelling teams, as well as experts in ESM evaluation, ESM projection and feedback analysis, climate impacts and science communication to address the following goals; (i) improve the process-realism and simulation-quality of European ESMs in order to increase the reliability of future Earth system projections; (ii) develop and apply a community ESM evaluation tool allowing routine ESM performance benchmarking, process-based ESM evaluation and the analysis of Earth system projections. The resulting tool will be installed and made openly-available on the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF); (iii) further develop the discipline of emergent constraints in order to better constrain the representation of key biogeochemical and aerosol feedbacks in ESMs and thereby reduce overall uncertainty in Earth system projections; (iv) quantify the effective radiative forcing of key biogeochemical and aerosol feedbacks in ESM projections; (v) contribute to the development of a new set of combined socio-economic and climate emission scenarios that more explicitly link future socio-economic development pathways with global radiative forcing; (vi) apply the project ESMs to these new scenario data to generate an ensemble of Earth system projections for the coming century and, in combination with the underlying socio-economic scenarios, use these projections to assess joint risks and co-benefits related to climate change, climate impacts, adaptation and mitigation; (vii) ensure data produced by CRESCENDO is available to the international community through timely archival on the ESGF and work closely with climate impact assessment and regional downscaling teams to ensure maximum uptake and use of these data in such complementary areas of science; (viii) actively disseminate knowledge generated in CRESCENDO to fellow scientists, policymakers and the general public.

Climateurope (12/2015 – 01/2021)

European Climate Observations, Modelling and Services – 2

Coord: Met Office (UK), Chris Hewitt

Project description: The Climateurope Action will coordinate and support Europe’s knowledge base to enable better management of climate-related risks and opportunities thereby creating greater social and economic value. Climateurope has four main objectives:

  1. Develop a European framework for Earth-system modelling and climate service activities. The framework will be built around a managed network of European, national and international activities and organisations. Such a network does not yet exist but is becoming increasingly necessary.
  2. Coordinate and integrate European climate modelling, climate observations and climate service infrastructure initiatives (including JPI-Climate, Climate-KIC, Copernicus C3S) and facilitate dialogue among the relevant stakeholders, including climate science communities, funding bodies, providers and users. This will improve synergies, reduce fragmentation and promote alignment between activities. The user communities will include public sector, businesses, industry and society.
  3. Establish multi-disciplinary expert groups to assess the state-of-the-art in Earth-system modelling and climate services in Europe; and identify existing gaps, new challenges and emerging needs.
  4. Enhance communication and dissemination activities with stakeholders, in particular through events to bring the network together and showcase progress; stakeholder-oriented reports on the state-of-the-art in Earth-system modelling and climate services in Europe; operating a website; and undertaking additional stakeholder interactions to increase awareness and maximise project impacts.

This CSA will deliver a range of highly beneficial impacts. Two key impacts are (i) to greatly enhance the transfer of information between suppliers and users to improve the resilience of European society to climate change and mitigation of the risk of dangerous climate change; and (ii) to improve coordination to increase efficiency, reduce fragmentation and create synergies with international R&I programmes.

ESM2025 (06/2021 – 05/2025)

Earth system models for the future

Coord: Météo-France (FR), Roland Séférian

EU-funded ESM2025 is an ambitious European research project on Earth system numerical modelling that will focus on the representation of interactions and couplings between Earth system model (ESM) components to improve key climate processes and better represent the full Earth system response to anthropogenic emissions and land-use change. ESM2025 will also take a step forward in providing relevant climate simulations for the development of ambitious and realistic mitigation and adaptation strategies in line with the Paris Agreement, by improving the physical coherence of climate and mitigation processes in ESMs and integrated assessment models. Expected project results will support international climate assessment reports (e.g. IPCC), climate change mitigation policy, climate change adaptation and local and national decision-making.

NextGEMS (09/2021 – 08/2025)

Next Generation Earth Modelling Systems

Coord: MPG (DE), Bjorn Stevens

A changing climate means a greater understanding is needed of the risk posed by global warming to society and ecosystems. The EU-funded NextGEMS project will address this challenge by developing and applying a new generation of global coupled storm-resolving Earth system models (SR-ESMs) for use in the ocean or atmosphere. SR-ESMs feature a fine grid of 3 km to give a more detailed picture of atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems, including their coupling to Earth-system processes such as the carbon, nutrients, water, and atmospheric particulate (aerosol) cycles. Consortium members will develop two prototypes SR-ESMs capable of generating 30-year projections of future climate change and maintaining Europe’s position at the forefront of Earth-system modelling.

Infrastructure projects

PRISM (12/2001 – 11/2004)

Programme for Integrated Earth System Modelling

Coord: MPG (DE), Reinhard Budich

Project description: Following the recommendations of the European climate research community (Euroclivar, November 1998), it is proposed to undertake a “Programme for Integrated Earth System Modelling” as a pilot infrastructure project for the establishment of a climate research network. The work plan foresees: (i) the creation of a European management structure for developing, coordinating and executing a long-term program of European-wide, multi-institutional climate simulations; (ii) the development of a set of portable climate community models and associated diagnostic software under standardised coding conventions that can be accessed by all European scientists; (iii) the execution of a first suite of joint simulations.

The PRISM activities are organised around five areas of expertise: Code Coupling and I/O, Integration & Modelling Environments, Data processing, visualisation and management, Metadata, Computing.

Resulting tools on Integration & Modelling Environments include: PRISM Standard Compile Environment (SCE); PRISM Standard Run Environment (SRE); Corporate Infrastructure Services: prepIFS (a flexible User Interface framework that allows tailored graphical user interfaces to be built for the configuration of models and other software); and Corporate Infrastructure Services: SMS Supervisor Monitoring Scheduler.

METAFOR (03/2008 – 08/2011)

Common metadata for climate modelling digital repositories Coord: University of Reading (UK), Bryan Lawrence

Project description: Climate science plays an increasingly important role for European policy-makers and private sector companies. Basic research and development of effective strategies to mitigate climate change and deal with its impact on society are required, involving a wide range of experts from multiple disciplines. These expert need to access climate data, in particular data from model projections for the next decades and centuries, and to assess the suitability of that data for their purposes. Currently, even if large repositories of climate data are accessible, these repositories are poorly connected and described. The data is therefore difficult to understand, compare and exploit because there is no common information paradigm.

The main objective of the FP7 METAFOR project is to define a Common Information Model (CIM) that describes in a standard way climate data and the models that produce the data. METAFOR will build on existing metadata (data describing data) currently used in existing data repositories and address issues like metadata fragmentation, gaps, or duplication. In close interaction with related initiatives at the international level, METAFOR will propose solutions to identify, access and use the climate data in these repositories. To support the adoption of the CIM, METAFOR will build CIM-based tools and services, allowing specific data and models to be found and compared between holdings at partner sites. METAFOR will therefore optimise the way climate data infrastructures are used to store knowledge, thereby adding value to primary research data for an increasingly wide range of stakeholders.

METAFOR will take the first step in doing for climate data what search engines have done for the Internet: it will put users of climate data in touch with the information they need. Simply unlocking existing climate data repositories for new communities will provide new exciting opportunities for scientific research, policy making, and private sector competitiveness.

ENES helped establish the FP7 METAFOR project. European and international Institutions joined efforts to define a Common Information Model (CIM) that describes in a standard way climate data and the models that produce the data.

The Metafor project is no longer active. Work on the Common Information Model is continuing under the ES-DOC collaboration, including services for searching and comparing CIM metadata within the IS-ENES projects.

IS-ENES (03/2009 – 02/2013)

InfraStructure for the European Network for Earth System Modelling

Coord: CNRS-IPSL (FR), Sylvie Joussaume

Project description : The IS-ENES FP7 project will develop a Virtual Earth System Modelling Resource Centre (V.E.R.C.) integrating the European Earth system models (ESMs) and their hardware, software, and data environments. The overarching goal of this e-infrastructure is to further integrate the European climate modelling community, to help the definition of a common future strategy, to ease the development of full ESMs, to foster the execution and exploitation of high-end simulations, and to support the dissemination of model results and the interaction with the climate change impact community. The V.E.R.C. encompasses models, the tools to prepare, evaluate, run, store and exploit model simulations, the access to model results and to the European high-performance computing ecosystem – in particular the EU large infrastructures DEISA2 and PRACE. The V.E.R.C. developed by IS-ENES is based on generic ICT, Grid technology and subject-specific simulation codes and software environments.

The European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES) leads IS-ENES. This network gathers the European climate and Earth system modelling community working on understanding and prediction of future climate change. This community is strongly involved in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and provides the predictions on which EU mitigation and adaptation policies are elaborated.

IS-ENES combines expertise in Earth system modelling, in computational science, and in studies of climate change impacts. IS-ENES will provide a service on models and model results both to modelling groups and to the users of model results, especially the impact community. Joint research activities will improve the efficient use of high-performance computers, model evaluation tool sets, access to model results, and prototype climate services for the impact community. Networking activities will increase the cohesion of the European ESM community and advance a coherent European Network for Earth System modelling.

IS-ENES will use the standards developed by the FP7 ENES METAFOR project “Common Metadata for Climate Modelling Digital repositories”.

IS-ENES2 04/2013 – 03/2017

InfraStructure for the European Network of Earth System Modelling, Phase 2

Coord: CNRS-IPSL (FR), Sylvie Joussaume

Project description: IS-ENES2 is the second phase project of the distributed e-infrastructure of models, model data and metadata of the European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES). This network gathers together the European modelling community working on understanding and predicting climate variability and change. ENES organizes and supports European contributions to international experiments used in assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This activity provides the predictions on which EU mitigation and adaptation policies are built.

IS-ENES2 further integrates the European climate modelling community, stimulates common developments of software for models and their environments, fosters the execution and exploitation of high-end simulations and supports the dissemination of model results to the climate research and impact communities.

IS-ENES2 implements the ENES strategy published in 2012 by: extending its services on data from global to regional climate models, supporting metadata developments based on the FP7 METAFOR project, easing access to climate projections for studies on climate impact and preparing common high-resolution modeling experiments for the large European computing facilities. IS-ENES2 also underpins the community’s efforts to prepare for the challenge of future exascale architectures.

IS-ENES2 combines expertise in climate modelling, computational science, data management and climate impacts. The central point of entry to IS-ENES2 services, the ENES Portal, integrates information on the European climate models and provides access to models and software environments needed to run and exploit model simulations, as well as to simulation data, metadata and processing utilities. Joint research activities improve the efficient use of high-performance computers and enhance services on models and data. Networking activities increase the cohesion of the European ESM community and advance a coordinated European Network for Earth System modelling.

IS-ENES3 (01/2019 – 03/2023)

InfraStructure for the European Network of Earth System Modelling, Phase 3

Coord: CNRS-IPSL (FR), Sylvie Joussaume

Project description : IS-ENES3 will deliver the third phase of the distributed e-infrastructure of the European Network for Earth System Modelling (ENES). IS-ENES3 will be initiated as the European climate modelling community faces the challenges of contributing to the next assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change through the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. IS-ENES3 will address these challenges by developing, documenting and deploying new and advanced models and tools, standards and services to deal with unprecedented data volumes and model complexity.

IS-ENES3 will stimulate collaboration, disseminate software and data, and further integrate the European climate science community. IS-ENES3 will support climate research, climate impact science, and the climate services industry. It will bring down barriers of access, and expand the community who can exploit the data and knowledge produced by state-of-the-art climate models. In doing so, it will find innovative ways of working with the Copernicus programme, other parts of the European data infrastructure, and with the high-performance computing and data analytics industries.

IS-ENES3 will be delivered by partners combining expertise in climate modelling, computational science, data management, climate impacts and climate services, with proven ability to increase the influence of European science internationally. It will deliver the European part of the Earth System Grid Federation and a central point of entry to services providing access to new data, software, models and tools. Joint research will support a new community sea ice model, promote efficient use of high-performance computing, improve the European common model evaluation framework, and develop and enhance services on data. Networking will grow the user base, increase the cohesion of the climate modelling community, promote innovation and prepare for a long-term sustainable infrastructure in support of climate modelling.

ESiWACE 09/2015 – 08/2019

Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe

Coord: DKRZ (DE), Joachim Biercamp

Project description : ESiWACE is a Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe funded by DG Connect under the Horizon 2020 programme. ESiWACE will substantially improve efficiency and productivity of numerical weather and climate simulation on high-performance computing platforms by supporting the end-to-end workflow of global Earth system modelling in HPC environment. This will be obtained by improving and supporting: (i) Scalability of models, tools and data management on state-of-the-art supercomputer systems; (ii) Usability of models and tools throughout the European HPC eco-system, and (iii) Exploitability of the huge amount of resulting data. ESiWACE will develop solutions for cross-cutting HPC challenges particular to the weather and climate domain. This will range from the development of specific software products to the deployment of user facing services for both, computing and storage.

ESiWACE leverages two established European networks, namely: the European Network for Earth System modelling (ENES) (https://enes.org) representing the European climate modelling community and the world leading European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) (http://www.ecmwf.int). The governance structure that defines the services to be provided will be driven by the European weather and climate science community. Weather and climate computing have always been one of the key drivers for HPC development, with domain specific scientific and technical requirements that stretch the capability and capacity of existing software and hardware to the limits.

By developing solutions for Europe and at European scale, ESiWACE will directly impact on the competitiveness of the European HPC industry by engendering new products, providing opportunities for exploitation beyond the project itself, and by enhancing the skills base of staff in both industry and academia. ESiWACE will be at once thematic, as it focuses on the HPC application domain of climate and weather modeling, transversal, as it covers several aspects of computational science, and challenge-driven, as climate and weather predictability represent a major societal issue.

ESiWACE2 (01/2019 – 12/2022)

Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe, Phase 2

Coord: DKRZ (DE), Joachim Biercamp

Project description : The path towards exascale computing holds enormous challenges for the community of weather and climate modelling regarding portability, scalability and data management that can hardly be faced by individual institutes. ESiWACE2 will therefore link, organise and enhance Europe’s excellence in weather and climate modelling to (1) enable leading European weather and climate models to leverage the performance of pre-exascale systems with regard to both compute and data capacity as soon as possible and (2) prepare the weather and climate community to be able to make use of exascale systems when they become available.

To achieve this goal, ESiWACE2 will (a) improve throughput and scalability of leading European weather and climate models and demonstrate the technical and scientific performance of the models in unprecedented resolution on pre-exascale EuroHPC systems, (b) evaluate and establish new technologies such as domain specific languages and machine learning for use in weather and climate modelling, (c) enhance HPC capacity via services to the weather and climate community to optimize code performance and allow model porting, (d) improve the data management tool chain from weather and climate simulations at scale, (e) foster co-design between model developers, HPC manufacturers and HPC centres, and (f) strengthen interactions of the community with the European HPC Eco-system.

ESiWACE2 will deliver configurations of leading models that can make efficient use of the largest supercomputers in Europe and run at unprecedented resolution for high-quality weather and climate predictions. This will be a beacon for the community in Europe and around the world. ESiWACE2 will develop HPC benchmarks, increase flexibility to use heterogeneous hardware and co-design and provide targeted education and training for one of the most challenging applications to shape the future of HPC in Europe.

EUDAT (09/02012 – 02/2015)

European Data

CSC IT Center for Science (FI)

Project description: EUDAT is our proposal for the next stage in the realisation of the vision of “data as infrastructure”. The EUDAT consortium includes representatives from each stage of the value chain that has evolved to deliver scientific knowledge to researchers, citizens, industry and society as a whole. It includes funding agencies that invest in research infrastructures and programmes of research, infrastructure operators and research communities who rely on the availability of data-management services, national data centres and providers of connectivity and, of course, the users who rely on the availability of data and services, innovators who add value to the raw results of scientific research. EUDAT is a three-year project that will deliver a Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) with the capacity and capability for meeting future researchers’ needs in a sustainable way. Its design will reflect a comprehensive picture of the data service requirements of the research communities in Europe and beyond. This will become increasingly important over the next decade as we face the challenges of massive expansion in the volume of data being generated and preserved (the so-called ‘data tsunami’) and in the complexity of that data and the systems required to provide access to it. Although those user requirements will vary between scientific disciplines, the micro-systems from which each community’s services are built are largely generic. This commonality will make it easier to achieve the minimum critical mass of users necessary for significant economies of scale to be achieved. The ability to rapidly provide bespoke responses to the evolving needs of our research communities additionally strengthens the business case for those communities. With the inclusion of disciplines from across the spectrum of scientific endeavour sharing a common infrastructure, EUDAT also provides the opportunity for data-sharing between disciplines and cross-fertilisation of ideas.

ENES is involved in EUDAT through the participation of DKRZ and CERFACS.

ENVRI-Plus (05/2015 – 07/2019)

Research Infrastructures Providing Shared Solutions for Science and Society

Coord: University of Helsinki (FI), Werner Kutsch

Project description: ENVRIPLUS is an H2020 cluster of research infrastructures (RIs) for Environmental and Earth System sciences, built around ESFRI roadmap and associating leading e-infrastructures and Integrating Activities together with technical specialist partners. ENVRIPLUS is driven by 3 overarching goals: 1) favoring cross-fertilization between infrastructures, 2) implementing innovative concepts and devices across RIs, and 3) facilitating research and innovation in the field of environment to an increasing number of users outside the RIs.

ENVRIPLUS organizes its activities along a main strategic plan where sharing multi-disciplinary expertise will be most effective. It aims to improve Earth observation monitoring systems and strategies, including actions towards harmonization and innovation, to generate common solutions to many shared information technology and data related challenges, to harmonize policies for access and provide strategies for knowledge transfer amongst RIs. ENVRIPLUS develops guidelines to enhance trans-disciplinary use of data and data-products supported by applied use-cases involving RIs from different domains. ENVRIPLUS coordinates actions to improve communication and cooperation, addressing Environmental RIs at all levels, from management to end-users, implementing RI-staff exchange programs, generating material for RI personnel, and proposing common strategic developments and actions for enhancing services to users and evaluating the socio-economic impacts. ENVRIPLUS is expected to facilitate structuration and improve quality of services offered both within single RIs and at pan-RI level. It promotes efficient and multi-disciplinary research offering new opportunities to users, new tools to RI managers and new communication strategies for environmental RI communities. The produced solutions, services and other project results are made available to all environmental RI initiatives, thus contributing to the development of a consistent European RI ecosystem.

IS-ENES (phase 2 and later phase 3), the infrastructure project of ENES, is a member of ENVRIplus and shares (via its partners CNRS and DKRZ) technical and strategic expertise with the other Research Infrastructures by contributing to ENVRIplus Themes 2 (Data for Science) and 6 (Communication and Dissemination) as well as by having representatives in the Board of European Environmental Research Infrastructures.