About the partner
Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR) at the University of Helsinki (UH) is a multi-disciplinary research unit with a staff of about 300 scientists and doctoral students. INAR research programme covers the central aspects of the Earth system, including weather and climate. It is one of the few institutes worldwide that comprehensively cover measurements and modelling of the atmosphere, greenhouse gases, trace gases, and aerosol and vegetation processes. INAR operates four field stations in Finland, is an active contributor to the OpenIFS initiative of ECMWF, and is a core member of the EC-Earth consortium. In supercomputing, INAR is a customer of the IT Centre for Science (CSC).
Role in the project
UH/INAR co-leads WP3, which tackles the challenge of exponentially growing climate and weather model output data by developing novel data layout concepts and recommendations for domain-specific data compression methods derived from community input. In particular, UH focuses on Task 3.2 of developing an online laboratory for data compression methods to enable domain scientists to efficiently experiment with and evaluate different compression methods on provided and their own datasets. UH also participates in the training and capacity-building efforts in WP5. In particular, it provides the pedagogical experts in higher education to review and test training materials for summer schools, hackathons, and online training. It will also co-organise one hackathon with a focus on data compression methods.
List of people involved
Heikki Jarvinen (WP3 co-leader), Victoria Sinclair, Juniper Tyree
Relevant infrastructure and services
UH/INAR has deep expertise in atmospheric data assimilation, global observing systems, weather and climate modelling, and machine-assisted learning to optimise the predictive skill of models. In addition, we are experts in higher education and university pedagogy. Our main modelling tools are OpenIFS and EC-Earth. We collaborate closely with CSC and have access to high-end super-computers, such as LUMI. INAR hosts CSC site engineers to implement and optimise weather and climate models for CSC computers and exploit new computing architectures, such as GPU acceleration.