New Met Office Africa-LAM dataset available from the BADC

The Met Office (UK) have developed a high resolution NWP Limited Area Model over Africa (the Africa LAM). This is running routinely and we are pleased to inform you that a selection of products from the model are now available from the NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) archive for use by academic researchers only.

Output fields include temperature, geopotential height, components of wind, specific humidity, cloud fraction, pressure, cloud liquid water and cloud ice content after large scale precipitation, components of gravity wave stress, convective cloud amount on each model level, etc.

Data is available for the period 2010 to present. Data covering the period January 2010 to mid-March 2011 are from the 20km 38L model configuration while data from mid-March 2011 are higher resolution from the 12km 70L model configuration.

Additional details, including geographical coverage, file format, and conditions of use, are available at:

http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__DE_2f0971ba-f76d-11df-8151-00e081470265

If you have any queries in relation to this dataset, please contact the BADC Helpdesk (badc@rl.ac.uk).

Please feel free to pass this message onto colleagues who may have an interest in using this dataset.

BADC Helpdesk
1st February 2012

BADC login down

Following the failure of a network switch at the BADC user login is down. This will affect access to some services and data. Systems support are in the process of replacing the switch and a swift resolution is expected.

BADC Webserver - recovery

• Trajectory service
• File uploader
• CEDA Visualisation service

We will restore these as soon as possible. Apologies for the disruption this has caused.

Regards,

BADC/NEODC team
20 September 2011

BADC Webserver - Static pages up

Following the attack on the BADC webserver over the weekend the BADC team have built a new secure web-server and are presently resurrecting the BADC website and services. At present just the static BADC pages are available and work is underway to systematically release all other parts of the BADC services once their security has been assured.

As parts of the service are returned to normal use fresh news items will be placed on the BADC website and on the BADC RSS feed.

BADC FTP service still operational: Access to the BADC archive is still available through the FTP server as this remains unaffected by the attack that affected the webserver.

The BADC apologies for the inconvenience that this is causing

In the meanwhile, should you have any questions or require assistance please feel free to contact the BADC helpdesk on badc@rl.ac.uk or 01235 446432.

Regards,

BADC/NEODC team
15 September 2011

BADC Webserver compromised

As a consequence the BADC website and those services reliant on the web-server in question will be unavailable while these corrective measures are put into place.

At present it is unclear to the extent of the intrusion over the weekend and our staff are already examining logs to ascertain if any personal login details were recovered from our systems. As a precautionary step, regardless of the encrypted nature of our password storage, we will reset all user passwords and issue emails with replacement passwords as soon as possible.

We apologise for the inconvenience this event has caused and we hope to return full service as soon as possible.

In the meanwhile, should you have any questions or require assistance please feel free to contact the BADC helpdesk on badc@rl.ac.uk or 01235 446432.

Regards,

BADC/NEODC team
13 September 2011

Server problems - notice of affected datasets

Following system disk problems, the following datasets are temporarily unavailable:

• RAPID
• Met Office metDB
• Met Office land surface data (old dataset, now superseded by MIDAS dataset which is still available)

We are working at restoring access to the affected datasets as soon as possible.

We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

BADC Helpdesk

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NEW - CEDA Web Processing Service launched for MIDAS data

The Centre for Environmental Data Archival, which runs the BADC, is pleased to announce the beta release of the "CEDA Web Processing Service".

This initial beta release provides extraction and station searches for the Met Office's MIDAS Land Surface Station dataset held at the BADC to allow MIDAS data users to test out this functionality in preparation for the phased withdrawal of the Data Extractor service

Why are we doing this?

While one of the most widely used services at the BADC is the Data Extractor increasing extraction and subsetting demands for large and complex data by an increasing number of users means that the Data Extractor service is no longer fit for purpose. The reason for this is that the service was originally developed for a limited number of applications and was not designed to be scalable. Thus, a more robust service, with scalable computer resources to hand has been developed over the last 18 months to enable the phased replacement of the Data Extractor.

Where to access the service

The CEDA Web Processing Service is available at:

http://ceda-wps.badc.rl.ac.uk

There are instructions on how to use the service (plus additional background information about the CEDA WPS itself) on the Documentation page. However, for MIDAS users we have also put together a dedicated guide on how to carry out extractions of MIDAS data which is available here:

http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/ukmo-midas/WPS.html

When will the service be fully released and what are the future plans?

We have launched the CEDA Web Processing Service as a beta release initially for MIDAS users to gain feedback on the functionality offered and to have the service more heavily used. In particular we are using this phase to test out the handling of multiple asynchronous jobs to ensure that services are scaling with demand. This phase will last for 1 month after which we will aim to fully release the service. At this point we will then withdraw the MIDAS data extractions for the Data Extractor to ease demand on that service for other users of other data.

Following the successful migration of MIDAS extraction services we will then undertake a phased migration of all services presently under the Data Extractor over to the new CEDA Web Processing Service (WPS) until we are able to finally retire the Data Extractor service. In addition, thanks to the way that the CEDA WPS has been built CEDA staff will then be able to bring additional functionality to the new service allowing new services to be integrated, with the added ability to daisy-chain services together. We already have one example of a possible sequence of such services with the present release where you can use the GetWeatherStations service to find the IDs of stations in a given geographical area and then extract meteorological data for those stations using the ExtractWeatherData service.

We look forward to our users' feedback over the next month and to bring you more functionality over the coming months.

BADC Helpdesk

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 ECSN Data Management Workshop 2011 - October, Edinburgh

The National Climate Information Centre (Met Office) are organising a data management workshop in October in Edinburgh. Details available at:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/conference/ecsn-workshop

The programme will include presentations of work submitted via the call for abstracts, a poster session and invited presentations on the following European activities:

• European Climate Support Network - Progress and Plans
• * HOME - the COST Action ES0601 on Climate Data Homogenisation
• * MEDARE - the WMO Mediterranean Data Rescue Initiative
• RCC CM - the WMO Regional Climate Centre for Climate Monitoring
• EUMETGRID - the coordination and harmonisation of European gridded observational data sets

Please address all enquiries regarding this event to the event organisers.

BADC Helpdesk

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The Science Visualisation Service for Earth Observation (SVSeo) has been developed as a web based application to allow users in the new International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) and the wider community to visualise and make use of Earth Observation data and climate model simulations. The application uses an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard Web Map Service (WMS)to display datasets as maps in the visualisation client.

Users can visually explore large and complex environmental datasets from observations and models, view, step through and zoom in to gridded datasets on a map view, export images as figures and create animations. Different views can be easily overlaid, e.g. different parameters in the same data, or different datasets. The images and animations can be exported for viewing and manipulation on the ISIC videowall, on Google Earth or other viewing software.

The SVSeo displays datasets which are made available through the CEDA (Centre for Environmental Data Archival (http://ceda.ac.uk ) archives through the CEDA OGC Web Services framework (COWS, http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/cows) but can include any remote data which are exposed via a WMS interface. The COWS server uses the GML application schema Climate Science Modelling Language (CSML http://csml.badc.rl.ac.uk) to describe the underlying datasets which are in netCDF data format compliant with CF (Climate and Forecasting) conventions.

The SVSeo website is available for use at http://isicvis.badc.rl.ac.uk/viewdata/

The SVSeo can also be used at the ISIC facility in conjunction with a large videowall to create WMS-based animations on a virtual globe. You can also load multiple images simultaneously on synchronised virtual globes.

The International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) is being established on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus (link opens in a new window). It will create a critical mass of space-related activities by linking existing distributed pockets of expertise in UK industry, academia and Government. This is being done in a setting that provides a unique concentration of facilities to support research, collaboration, operations and business growth promoting self sustainability. ISIC is a not-for-profit company with a range of public and private partners. ISIC was officially launched on Friday 6 May 2011 with an opening ceremony conducted by HRH Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science.

Information on the launch of the International Space Innovation Centre can be found here: http://www.stfc.ac.uk/isic/34628.aspx

For further information on the visualisation software or ISIC visualisation facilities please contact: Dominic Lowe (dominic.lowe@stfc.ac.uk) or Jon Blower (j.d.blower@reading.ac.uk).

BADC Helpdesk
16th May 2011