Scientists and stakeholders from sectors affected by weather and climate conditions (civil protection, agriculture, construction, tourism, etc.) need easily accessible meteorological and climate information and the calculation of climate indices to support decision making processes. For that reason, high skills and expertise in climate science and computing is needed along with data storage and computing resources which might not be available from stakeholders. In addition, stakeholders need to relate the climatic indices with geospatial information (such as population, population density, land use, etc.) and understand the climatic impacts through the areas, population, land uses affected. Real-time weather information is important but can be only leveraged manually, as the users must read long tables of data, or look at maps, to do statistics on the datasets.
The DataGEMS services will cultivate a shared knowledge base, enabling stakeholders and researchers to collectively tackle the complex challenges posed by climate change. Seamless access to and management of increasing volumes of weather and climate data following open and FAIR principles is expected to stimulate the development and uptake of a wide range of new innovative and value-added services.
DataGEMS services will provide citizens easily accessible weather and climate information. The services will improve their climate literacy, will give them the opportunity to look (without need to have computing expertise) into the weather time series and evolution and understand the changes of weather parameters in their region. Through the operation of www.meteo.gr, visited by >350,000 visitors per day, these services will be disseminated to the general public and help them become weather and climate data consumers.
