An integral part of EUMETSAT’s operational infrastructure, the Data Centre is more than a secure store for all of the organisation’s satellite data and derived products, the task commonly associated with an archive. Additionally, the Data Centre provides a full service infrastructure for accessing and retrieving the archived data. The latter user-related component is of growing importance as data retrieval amounts are growing quickly and interoperability with more partners and programmes, e.g. Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), will widen the Data Centre user community.

With 10 employees, the EUMETSAT Data Centre supports the data needs of external users such as the National Meteorological Services, research organisations, universities and commercial companies. It also supports internal use such as scientific and reprocessing activities. Data retrieval is carried out in parallel to safely ingest the constant satellite data flow.

User access to and orders of EUMETSAT data from the Data Centre are increasing continually. An average of 50 new users register every month to be able to order data from the Data Centre. Over 2,500 users are currently registered. While some of these users only visit the Data Centre occasionally, some order data regularly and others order large amounts of data. As many researchers are now interested in longer time series for climate-related studies, orders in the range of 1 Terabyte (1 TB) are not unusual.

In 2009, a new milestone was reached when the 1 petabyte point was reached.1,044 terabytes were retrieved from the archive in response to user ordering over the year. This is more than twice the amount retrieved in 2008 (417 TB) and also more than twice the total current size of the archive (478 TB). If written on commonly used film DVDs, a stack the height of the Eiffel Tower would be generated.

The amount of data retrieved from the Data Centre through user ordering is now more than 10 times the amount of all the satellite data and products archived in the same time-span, a fact which clearly demonstrates that the Data Centre is more than a safe data store.

The retrieved data is processed according to the user request (e.g. band subsetting, spatial subsetting, reformatting) before it is written to media or delivered online to the user. The shipped order size is typically 25 per cent of the retrieved data volume. This substantial data reduction prior to delivery is not only an added service to the user as it lessens the computing load on the customer site, it also reduces the use of Internet bandwidth and delivery media. In one month, an average of 17,000 user orders are processed, each containing an average of 40 products.

The above values highlight the growing user demand and the importance of the Data Centre for our users. The table below presents examples of the main users of the Data Centre in the various organisational categories:

To cope with the growing demand and new data streams from satellite missions planned in the future, the systems in the Data Centre are continually upgraded. The evolution of the Data Centre infrastructure is also of key importance for EUMETSAT as an agency supporting climate monitoring.

The near future will see the integration of Data Centre Search and Ordering into the EO Portal, a project planned to be completed in 2010. The EO Portal with the provided interoperability is an important EUMETSAT contribution to various organisations and programmes - like the World Meteorological Organization, Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and GMES - and will allow even more users easy access to EUMETSAT’s services and data.

The Data Centre also hosts and operates the EUMETSAT Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System (GSICS) data and product server. GSICS is an international collaborative effort to examine and harmonize data from operational weather satellites to improve climate monitoring and weather forecasting. If you are interested in the services on offer, please follow the link to the EUMETSAT Data Centre pages.

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