Julia Wagemann and Esperanza Cuartero, Programme managers of ECMWF Summer of Weather Code
ECMWF’s fourth Summer of Weather Code (ESoWC) came to a close with the Final ESoWC Day on 29 September 2021. The day-long online event showcased the outcomes of nine open-source projects, which developer teams worked on during a coding period between May and August.
ESoWC began in 2018 after staff at ECMWF had the idea of working with small external teams of developers to address various software-related challenges faced by the Centre. Ideas for developments are proposed by ECMWF, and external developers apply with proposed solutions. Selected teams then enter a coding period to work on their ideas, closely mentored by ECMWF and Copernicus staff.
2021 saw ESoWC run for the fourth time.
ESoWC 2021 projects were at the intersection of machine learning, web development and visualisation, data compression and open data exploration.
Advancing machine learning in Earth system science
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MaLePoM: Machine learning for pollution monitoring
Nicolo Brunello, Vidur Mithal, Paolo Fornoni and Luca Rampini implemented a machine learning workflow to estimate NOx emissions with the help of suitable proxy data from anthropogenic activities, such as dynamic traffic data and others.
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ML4Land: Using Earth observation data, climate reanalysis and machine learning to detect Earth’s heating patterns
Avishree Khare and Het Shah developed a machine learning model that predicts land-surface temperature based on ERA5 climate reanalysis variables on a regional scale.
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AQ bias correction
Antonio Perez Velasco and Mario Santa Cruz Lopez explored the use of machine learning in order to adjust biases between models and observations in air quality forecasts.
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CliMetLab: Machine learning on weather and climate data
CliMetLab is an early-stage open-source Python package aimed at simplifying meteorological and climate data preparation for machine learning projects. Ashwin Samudre helped to implement some important features that will help to enhance the functionalities of the package.
Web development and improving the visualisation of weather data
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ECMWF user dashboard
Varun Bankar developed an interactive user dashboard, which allows ECMWF users to choose and load different services, e.g. ECMWF web charts, and customize their dashboard view.
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BlenderNC enhancements
Tisham Dhar, Gichini Ngaruiya and Josue Martinez Moreno enhanced the BlenderNC software to support the loading of GRIB files. This is an important step forward to increase the use of BlenderNC in the meteorological community to make long-lasting visualisations with weather data.
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Meeresvogel
Kathryn Schmitt developed additional functionalities for Google Earth to be able to better represent meteorological information, such as wind or mean sea level pressure. These light-weight features will be very useful for sailors, who need fast and easy access to such information.
Atmospheric composition data
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Elefridge.jl: Compressing atmospheric data into its real information content
This project was already part of ESoWC 2020 and Milan Kloewer continued his work on exploring the potential of compressing atmospheric data while preserving real information to reduce storage and to facilitate data sharing. It provided evidence that the size of climate and weather forecast data archives can be reduced by one to two orders of magnitude without losing valuable information.
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ADC Toolbox: Comparing atmospheric composition datasets
Alba Vilanova Cortezon developed a Python-based toolbox which facilitates the comparison of satellite- and model-based data on atmospheric composition, such as data from CAMS and from the GOME-2 and IASI instrument onboard the polar-orbiting MetOp-ABC satellites.
About ESoWC
Since 2018, summers at ECMWF have been full of coding, open-source development and innovation. During ESoWC’s coding phase, several developer teams work with experienced mentors at ECMWF and from the Copernicus Programme to work on cutting-edge open-source software developments. This strong and close collaboration with ECMWF and Copernicus mentors makes ESoWC stand out and results in high-quality outcomes. Collaborations often continue beyond the official end of ESoWC.
In the past four years, 30 innovation projects have been realised, and the programme has constantly grown through strategic partnerships with the two Copernicus services operated by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union. Important partnerships also exist with two European cloud services, the European Weather Cloud and the Copernicus DIAS service WEkEO. These partnerships support ESoWC in its mission to be a catalyst for innovation and open-source software developments in the meteorological and climate community.
Coming up: ESoWC goes into its fifth round in 2022
Summers at ECMWF and Copernicus continue to bring innovation. Preparations for the fifth round of ESoWC have already started. Each year in February, the application phase opens and a new list of ESoWC challenges is published on Github. Developer teams have until April to submit their proposals, and on 1 May 2022, a new round of cutting-edge open-source development starts.
Calls for proposals for the next ESoWC will open in early 2022.
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