Online Laboratory for Climate Science and Meteorology
Code of the Month No. 14, on 19 February 2025
Presenter: Juniper Tyree, U. Helsinki
While the output volumes from high-resolution weather and climate models are increasing exponentially, data storage, access, and analysis methods have not kept up. Lossy data compression is a vital tool to keep up with this increase in data production. However, information loss sounds scary and a convincing argument for lossy data compression can only be made by domain scientists themselves by trying it out for themselves.
Interactive code notebooks (e.g. Jupyter) have become popular for sharing and communicating computational experiments, analyses, and visualizations. While sharing the notebooks is easy, running them requires hosting a JupyterLab server and installing all Python and system libraries required for the notebook. This initial setup cost hinders quickly experimenting with a shared notebook and testing, e.g. a practical example of lossy data compression for oneself.
As part of the EuroHPC ESiWACE, Phase 3, Centre of Excellence (https://www.esiwace.eu/), an Online Laboratory for Climate Science and Meteorology (https://lab.climet.eu) has been developed, a JupyterLab instance that runs serverless just within a web browser and comes with many libraries pre-installed. With the online lab, running and exploring a shared notebook can start within a minute. The online laboratory provides domain scientists with an online compression laboratory, https://compression.lab.climet.eu, to reduce the barrier to experimenting with the effect of lossy compression on their own data. ESiWACE3 have also been working on allowing the online laboratory to be used for sharing open science and interactive documentation by the broader community.