Impact-Story on Centre for Environmental Data Analysis

Sustainable computing the UK’s journey to net zero digital research infrastructure by 2040

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:29:06 +0000

Leading UK data and computing experts have developed a toolkit and roadmap to get the UK’s digital research infrastructure sector to net zero.

JASMIN helps to predict seabird breeding abundance in a changing climate

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 10:28:59 +0000

Many of us have been to the coast and seen seabirds, but have you ever considered how they might be affected by climate change? The UK is surrounded by important populations of seabirds, including Arctic Tern, Kittiwake, and Puffin, that play a key role as top predators and indicators of the health of marine ecosystems. Like many animals, seabirds are exposed to climate change in both marine and terrestrial environments, but the combined effects are rarely considered. Climate change impacts seabird species through a number of mechanisms; for example, by shifting the distributions of prey species, influencing storminess which affects mortality rates, causing overheating at the nest site, or increasing sea level and reducing available breeding habitat. CEDA services were used by researchers at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to predict future seabird abundance under both marine and terrestrial climate change, as part of the Marine Protected Area Management and Monitoring ( MarPAMM ) project.

CEDA services improve access to global climate data

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 07:00:00 +0000

A diverse set of companies, governments and individuals are now able to access global climate projections data via the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). C3S provides climate data to support adaptation and mitigation measures across Europe.

Oceans in the Cloud working interactively with huge datasets using Pangeo

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 14:44:29 +0000

The properties of our oceans are changing. The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean and as a consequence of climate change, it is warming at an alarming rate. Warming oceans lead to a decline in Antarctic sea ice, increased ocean freshening, sea-level rise, reduced oxygen and CO2 uptake and slow the vertical exchange of waters. This may bring about increased food scarcity, diseases, extreme weather events, loss of coastal protection, and more. It is therefore extremely important to have a detailed understanding of what could happen in the future with a Southern Ocean that is warmer, less salty and is circulating in different ways.

JASMIN helps track the impact of climate change on UK birds

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 09:32:31 +0000

Over 600 different species of birds have been recorded in the UK to date[1] . For many of them formal monitoring is limited or absent. British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) ask for volunteers from the public to report nature observations from around the UK on mobile apps or online data entries such as BirdTrack . This is important because estimating bird distributions and population trends increases our knowledge about bird species or their habitats. Over 60,000 volunteers are involved recording bird species, resulting in a massive amount of data collected - in 2020 alone over 7.5 million records have been submitted to BirdTrack. Researchers at BTO have been using JASMIN to carry out statistical analysis on these data in order to better understand the reliability of Citizen Science data and the changes in UK bird populations that can be inferred from it.

Enabling essential climate science research

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 09:50:43 +0000

Climate Change is a defining issue of our time. The UK’s top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2002, and July 2019 saw the UK’s hottest ever recorded temperature (38.7 °C). Whilst many are enjoying the unusually non-rainy British weather, it doesn’t come without costs. Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and flash flooding, are expected to increase in severity and frequency as our climate continues to change. Extreme weather can adversely affect the way we live our lives. Loss of food production, damaging wildlife habitats, and endangering human life are just a few impacts associated with climate change. Predicting global climate change is complex and requires vast amounts of data processing capabilities. Steps must be taken to improve the accuracy of future climate models. That’s where JASMIN - a data intensive supercomputer - comes in.

Using JASMIN for the largest ever UK wildlife assessment

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 16:24:16 +0000

Most of the UK’s wildlife is in decline, according to the 2019 State of Nature (SoN) report . However getting to this statement was not an easy process. Imagine trying to measure trends across thousands of different species and millions of datapoints, with biases in the data thrown in for added complexity… but that’s exactly what scientists have now done. The most comprehensive SoN report has now been completed with the help of JASMIN - our globally unique petascale analysis facility for data-intensive environmental science. Researchers relying on JASMIN for their data analysis contributed information to the SoN report, including several wildlife groups that had previously been impossible to analyse.