STFC Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) Annual Report 2016 (April 2016-March 2017)

The mission of the Centre for Environmental Archival (CEDA) is to deliver long term curation of scientifically important environmental data at the same time as facilitating the use of data by the environmental science community. CEDA was established by the amalgamation of the activities of two of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) designated data centres: the British Atmospheric Data Centre, and the NERC Earth Observation Data Centre, and consolidated annual reports have been produced since 2009. This annual report presents key statistics for the year past (2014- 2015) as well as a series of snapshots of activity, expressed as short highlights and short reports. Key data centre metrics are also provided. This year was characterised by the major upgrade in JASMIN capability(JASMIN being the data intensive supercomputer which provides the fabric upon which CEDA and the CEDA services are delivered). As in the advent of JASMIN itself, in early 2012, this has had a major impact both on what CEDA can do, and the services that can be offered to the community — and the uptake in the community is clear to see in the statistics presented here. The consequences for CEDA itself are still being worked through, but it is clear that there is a significant expansion in the role of CEDA staff whose expertise must now embrace support for “big data” tools and algorithms by archive and other users on JASMIN. Notwithstanding this new role, as in previous years, CEDA staff are involved in nearly all the major atmospheric science programmes underway in the UK, in many earth observation programmes, and in a wide range of informatics activities. Over the years we have reported our key partnerships, and as before, these revolve around our neighbours on the Harwell site (including the Satellite Applications Catapult, with whom we share delivery of the facility for Climate and Environmental Monitoring from Space, CEMS), the European Network for Earth Simulation (with whom we share the delivery of the European component of the Earth System Grid Federation), and many other project collaborators