First OCRE Cloud Funding for Research project launches

OCRE and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) have launched the first fully contracted mini-competition project, funded by the EC using the OCRE procurement mechanism.

KNMI is the Dutch national weather service. The primary tasks of KNMI are weather forecasting and monitoring of weather, climate, air quality and seismic activity. KNMI advises on and warns society to reduce risks in the field of weather, climate and seismology and to limit damage and injuries. 

With this OCRE adoption funded project, KNMI wants to provide a consistent, homogeneous, up to date, and validated vertical ozone profile data set from 22 years of satellite measurements. These can be used for the WMO Ozone Assessment and other scientific applications. Ozone is a well known trace gas species in our atmosphere that resides mostly in the stratospheric 'ozone layer', blocking damaging UV radiation from reaching the Earth's surface. Due to its complexity, an optimal estimation-based ozone profile retrieval is a relatively computationally expensive process.

OCRE Procurement Lead Monique Pellinkhof who has been supporting research projects in procuring services under the OCRE Cloud Catalogue said, “There have been many challenges to launching this first project, including VAT, EC funding eligibility and getting all contracts in place between all parties involved (the Institutions, the awarded supplier and GÉANT). But this project, and the other 14 upcoming projects, will provide a proof of concept for OCRE procurement with GÉANT as the Central Purchasing Body for its community with EC Cloud Services adoption funding.”

OCRE was contracted by the EC to distribute adoption funding for Cloud services. OCRE Coordinator GÉANT acts as Central Purchasing Body for their community, coordinating mini-competitions within the OCRE framework to get the best proposal, ideal solution and added value for the awarded adoption funded projects. Through this mini-competition KMNI has found the best match for the needs and requirements for the project in Rackspace as their partner.

The Rackspace solution (using AWS platform) provides the IaaS computing resources necessary to allow the KNMI to do a fast ozone profile retrieval reprocessing of the entire fresh GOME-2 L1b data set within 1-2 months. 

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