Online computing training week

Virtual | 13-16 June 2022

Online computing training week offers webinars on a variety of topics related to software and applications used at ECMWF in both operational production and non-operational environments. The aim of the week is to provide updates on software and introduce new tools and computing activities at ECMWF. The webinars will familiarise participants with how these applications and software are used at ECMWF and provide attendees with information on how to use them effectively. The webinars are open to all, however, some products and services that will be showcased are only accessible to Member and Co-operating States.

Webinars will also include software packages specifically developed to handle data and observations coding and decoding, visualisation, data manipulation and archiving and managing of workflows. A full list of software packages available can be found on our Software page.

Webinar dates

European Weather Cloud

Monday 13 June 14:00 to 15:30 BST (13:00 to 14:30 UTC)

Roberto Cuccu, ECMWF

The European Weather Cloud is a cloud-based processing infrastructure as a joint initiative of ECMWF and EUMETSAT to offer computing resources to their Member and Co-operating States. The training session will provide an overview of the available cloud services offered within the EWC together with a practical demonstration. We will show how to provision basic computing resources and how to exploit the available services, the fast MARS data access and integration with other ECMWF tools.

Atos HPC: how to use the new platforms in Bologna

Tuesday 14 June 14:00 to 16:00 BST (13:00 to 15:00 UTC)

Bojan Kasic, Xavier Abellan, ECMWF

After the move of our Data Centre to Bologna, the Atos HPCF becomes the computing platform that replaces both the current Cray HPCF and Ecgate services. In this session we will show the main features of the new platform and highlight the main aspects to consider when moving from previous platforms.

We will also cover the new methods of accessing those computing resources, including the Teleport SSH service and the new VDI for graphical access.

GRIB and ecCodes

Wednesday 15 June 10:00 to 11:15 BST (9:00 to 10:15 UTC)

Paul Dando, Sebastien Villaume, Shahram Najm, ECMWF

ecCodes is a package developed by ECMWF which provides an application programming interface and a set of tools for decoding and encoding GRIB and BUFR messages.  This webinar will provide a very short introduction to GRIB and ecCodes followed by an interactive demo where the ecCodes command line tools and, if time allows, the Python API will be used to inspect and make simple modifications to GRIB messages.  Some plans for the future of GRIB and ecCodes at ECMWF will also be presented.

Exploring climate data with the Climate Data Store

Wednesday 15 June 14:00 to 15:00 BST (13:00 to 14:00 UTC)

James Varndell, ECMWF

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store (CDS) is a single point of access to a wide range of free, quality-assured climate data, along with a suite of tools for performing cloud-based analysis and visualisation of very large datasets. Launched in 2018, the CDS provides over 100 datasets and 30 interactive applications for a global, interdisciplinary and intersectoral audience of over 120,000 users.

In this webinar, we will work through an interactive demo which explores:

  • CDS registration
  • Dataset discovery and retrieval
  • Simple data processing in the CDS toolbox
  • Using CDS applications

Jupyter notebooks for Open Charts and Copernicus data

Thursday 16 June 10:00 to 11:00 BST (9:00 to 10:00 UTC)

Milana Vuckovic, Chris Stewart, ECMWF

The use of Jupyter notebooks at ECMWF has been steadily increasing over the last couple of years. They are used by ECMWF scientists and analysts both in their everyday work and for training and outreach activities. 
The Copernicus Climate and Atmosphere Data Stores are great resources with a wealth of freely available data. At the same time ECMWF opened a subset of their real time forecast data this year. To make this data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and help new users explore the data, we have developed several sets of Jupyter notebooks.
In this webinar Chris Stewart will 
present and demonstrate Jupyter notebook tutorials that guide users on how to access and handle data from the Copernicus Climate Change and Atmosphere Monitoring Services, and Milana Vuckovic will present the new set of notebooks to reproduce the Open Charts forecast products using the new open-source Python libraries.

Slicing and dicing GRIB data

Thursday 16 June 14:00 - 15:00 BST (13:00 to 14:00 UTC)

Iain Russell, Sandor Kertesz, ECMWF

This webinar will demonstrate various ways that GRIB data can be sliced and subsetted for the purposes of reducing data volumes, restricting computations to specified areas and viewing vertical structures in 3D data. Everything will be done in Python using ECMWF's Metview software.