An interoperable research data infrastructure to support climate service development

Abstract. Accessibility, availability, re-use and re-distribution of scientific data are prerequisites to build climate services across Europe. From this perspective the Institute of Biometeorology of the National Research Council (IBIMET-CNR), aiming at contributing to the sharing and integration of research data, has developed a research data infrastructure to support the scientific activities conducted in several national and international research projects. The proposed architecture uses open-source tools to ensure sustainability in the development and deployment of Web applications with geographic features and data analysis functionalities. The spatial data infrastructure components are organized in typical client–server architecture and interact from the data provider download data process to representation of the results to end users. The availability of structured raw data as customized information paves the way for building climate service purveyors to support adaptation, mitigation and risk management at different scales.

This work is a bottom-up collaborative initiative between different IBIMET-CNR research units (e.g. geomatics and information and communication technology – ICT; agricultural sustainability; international cooperation in least developed countries – LDCs) that embrace the same approach for sharing and re-use of research data and informatics solutions based on co-design, co-development and co-evaluation among different actors to support the production and application of climate services. During the development phase of Web applications, different users (internal and external) were involved in the whole process so as to better define user needs and suggest the implementation of specific custom functionalities. Indeed, the services are addressed to researchers, academics, public institutions and agencies – practitioners who can access data and findings from recent research in the field of applied meteorology and climatology.