MISTRAL – Meteo Italian SupercompuTing poRtAL

The MISTRAL Project – Meteo Italian SupercompuTing poRtAL, funded under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) – Telecommunication Sector Programme of the European Union, started on 1 October 2018.  

The project aim is the creation of a National Meteorological Open Data Portal to provide citizens, public administrations and national and international private organizations with meteorological data from observational networks, historical and real-time analyses and forecasts, with high accuracy. The data will be available in terms of gridded fields, probabilistic products (as rainfall forecasts for flash flood prediction) or point time-series coming from the Italian operational forecast modelling chain and post-processing fields (as thunderstorm probability). The goal of the MISTRAL portal is to facilitate and foster the re-use of the datasets by the weather community, as well as by its cross-area communities, to provide added value services through the use of HPC resources, turning it into the level of new business opportunities.

Goals

To design a business model is one of the project output: the national portal MISTRAL will be active not only for the duration of the project, but will be a stable instrument for the dissemination of meteorological data and it will be dedicated to different kind of end users, scientific community, researchers, general public, local, national and international institutions. Moreover, this Portal could be integrated into the European Data Portal to achieve a highest level of visibility through a pan-European synergy.  

Innovative technology for HPC facilities and big data storage will be used to support the MISTRAL portal implementation.
Big data storage and HPC facilities will be made available to the project in order to perform post-processing and visualisation of the observed and forecast data, in order to make the forecasts more useful and usable, tailoring the output to the need of the intended audience.

Six partners and an inclusive approach to involve users. 

CINECA, the Italian Civil Protection Department, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Regional Agency for the Environmental Protection of Emilia Romagna, the Regional Agency for the Environmental Protection of Piedmont, Dedagroup Public Services are the project partners, and will work together with the national wider meteorological community to promote the “data opening” and to implement tools to collect, harmonise, aggregate, discover, view, download, transform and disseminate scientifically significant weather data and forecast. The consortium of partners will define open data policies for the national weather data in order to define a national regulation and promote the weather data re-use.