1. Baudouin Raoult Head of Data and Services Section
SIMDAT
Baudouin Raoult
Head of Data and Services Section
67th Council June 2007

2. 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.
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3. 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.
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4. The VGISC architecture
Architecture of vgisc, with other wis actors. virtualisation
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5. 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
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6. Access to existing data repositories in a non-intrusive fashion
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7. Connectivity to another site via secure connection layer
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8. A scalable system: addition of new sites
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9. 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
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10. Data from anywhere can be accessed from everywhere
Retrievals
Data from anywhere can be accessed from everywaher
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11. 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)
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12. Result achieved
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13. 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
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14. 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 June 2007