FOCAL: Development of an open compute platform for efficient exploration of climate data locally

Poster
In session Postersession No. 2 , Sept. 3, 2025, 18:15 – 19:00
Exact timing: 18:15 – 19:00

Simonis, Ingo¹ , Würz, H. M.² , Moravcová, K.³ , Klien, E.² , Charvát, K.⁴ , Rechid, D.⁵ , Samakinwa, E.⁵ , Cohrs, J.-C.⁵

Climate change has strong effects on many areas in our daily life. It, therefore, requires a thorough understanding of climate change and its consequences to develop effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. The wealth of available data and services is a key to help understand climate change. However, they are often not easily accessible and interpretable, and the hurdle to work with them is high for non-domain experts.

The EU Horizon project FOCAL aims to bridge the gap between data, services and end users by implementing a platform that enables easy and efficient exploration of climate data on a local scale. In particular, decision-making processes of stakeholders in the fields of forestry and urban planning shall be supported with the developed tools. To this end, an open compute platform will be implemented and launched that combines intelligent workflow management with high-performance computing (HPC) resources. A modular and interoperable platform architecture will be used that provides software container-based services. Furthermore, new AI tools to enhance the climate data analysis in terms of speed, robustness and accuracy and to broaden the toolkit of climate data analysis and impact assessment tools will be investigated, developed and made available via the platform.

An additional co-design process between developers and potential end users from forestry and urban planning will be carried out to specify data workflows and user interaction elements to ensure an easy and straightforward interaction of end users with the platform and, consequently, with the data and tools allowing for a fast interaction with climate data to support decision makers in their decisions about climate adaptation strategies. The workflows developed in the co-design process aim to provide information to answer specific user questions by leveraging the innovative tools and HPC resources of the platform. The execution of workflows will be orchestrated by an open-source workflow management system that allows for human-in-the-loop interactions during AI training and execution of loops without a priori knowledge of the runtime.

End users from disciplines and areas that are not directly related to climatology can access and use the platform via easy-to-use web applications, while also a more direct access to the platform resources in form of APIs will be implemented to allow user groups like developers, scientists and small to medium-sized enterprises to use the platform resources directly and integrate the newly developed tools via provided services or modules in their own products. The offered services will comply with the standards and conventions of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to be in line with international standardization processes.

A focus will lie on the interoperability of the system to ensure a seamless integration of tools and resources provided by other systems and platforms. New data that is produced during the lifetime of the project will be made available under the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principle.

The design of the platform and the investigation of new potentially AI-based methods is complemented by clustering and community empowerment activities to ensure the visibility of FOCAL platform and its survival also after the project lifetime.