On 10 and 11 December 2014 ECMWF hosted a meeting where the EU-funded CHARMe project launched its system for sharing information about climate datasets. Partners reviewed the project’s progress over the past year and held a symposium entitled "Climate data informatics – sharing our collective expertise". The symposium gathered scientists working on related projects such as CORE-CLIMAX, QA4ECV, CLIPC, and ERA-CLIM. Question and answer sessions and system demonstrations provided an opportunity to discuss how the CHARMe system can help data providers, scientists, Copernicus services, and consultants to select relevant information.
The project has developed a suite of tools to enable commentary metadata to be associated with climate-related datasets: CHARMe plug-in, CHARMe Maps, and the Significant Event Viewer. ECMWF developed the Significant Event Viewer and used the CHARMe plug-into link reanalysis datasets to the commentary annotations. The Significant Event Viewer is a web-based graphical tool for visualizing climate time series with their associated events. Although the tool focuses on reanalysis datasets, it is designed to be general enough to be extended to other datasets and user needs. This will enable users to become more familiar with the variety of observations that feed into the reanalysis, and to determine whether the variability and features seen in the dataset were likely to be artefacts of the measurements or processing steps, or real changes in the environment.
As the project draws to a close, the partners looked ahead to how CHARMe will be used and supported from 2015. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) hosts the central node and supports the annotations database. Many data providers, including ECMWF, have already implemented the CHARMe icon on their databases and a project is under way in the United States to connect scientists there to the network.
CHARMe project and partners
CHARMe is a European collaborative project that is coordinated by the University of Reading and has 9 partners from both industry and public institutions. The 2-year project started in January 2013.
Partners: Science and Technology Facilities Council, University of Reading, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), Deutscher Wetterdienst, Airbus Defence & Space, Terra Spatium SA, CGI, UK Met Office, and ECMWF