Amazon collaborates with Earth System Grid Federation to increase access to climate model dataset

As the effects of climate change become more evident, climate models have become an increasingly essential tool for researchers seeking to predict how those changes might manifest in the future.

Those models, which are also called general circulation models, “use mathematical equations to characterize how energy and matter interact in different parts of the ocean, atmosphere, and land,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The models’ predictive ability (which are tested by a process called hind-casting, whereby the models are run backward in time and checked for accuracy) is crucial to our understanding of climate behavior in the coming years and decades.

Today, Amazon announced that, through two data grants from the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) to the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), it is hosting petabytes of data from the largest and most updated climate-simulation dataset in the world — Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). ASDI seeks to foster sustainability innovation and problem solving by promoting cloud literacy and leveraging Amazon’s cloud to facilitate access and analyses of key data.

In that spirit, Amazon is enabling climate researchers worldwide to access and analyze the CMIP6 dataset used for the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR6). The report, which is scheduled to be published in May 2022, provides policymakers worldwide with the latest assessment of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.

CMIP6, which was traditionally hosted and distributed through ESGF servers, aggregates climate models created across approximately 30 working groups and 1,000 researchers working on IPCC-AR6. Hosting the climate-simulation dataset in the cloud eliminates the need for researchers to download or store the data.

“Making the CMIP6 data available on the AWS Cloud is an important step in the process of democratizing access to climate data and enabling easier, faster, and cheaper analysis of foundational datasets,” said Ana Pinheiro Privette, senior program manager for Amazon Sustainability. “This is critical to not only advancing the climate science space, but also facilitating access to key insights that help business and communities prepare for future climate conditions. ASDI is committed to working with the climate science community to remove barriers to their work by leveraging Amazon’s scale and technology.”

This blog post provides more information about the project, including how AWS is enabling private sector companies to build products and services that help assess climate-related risks, and how researchers wishing to use this data on AWS can apply for cloud grants. You can also hear Privette talk more about this topic on the AWS Fix This Earth Day 2021 podcast.