MISTRAL

The goal of the MISTRAL portal is to facilitate and foster the re-use of the datasets by the weather community, as well as by its cross-area communities, to provide added value services through the use of HPC resources, turning it into the level of new business opportunities. The data will be available in terms of gridded fields, probabilistic products (as rainfall forecasts for flash flood prediction) or point time-series coming from the Italian operational forecast modelling chain and post-processing fields (as thunderstorm probability).

Ten specific project’s objectives lead the activity implementation:

• to improve the access to large datasets of the weather public institutions
• to unleash a large scale weather datasets creative exploitation using supercomputers
• to create a new service at the Italian national level, that address the scalable exploitation of the massive amount of public open data available and accessible (Big Data Challenge)
• to exploit supercomputing facilities to analyze complex combinations of large public weather datasets to make the forecasts more valuable
• to improve the interoperability of weather regional data providers thank to adoption of international standards
• to provide the direct upload of the data generated by the supercomputers onto the Italian National Data Open Portal and into EU Open Data Portal, assuring trans-European access, interoperability and services linking the weather sector to the core service platform of EU Open Data Portal
• to provide official and certified data and services to foster data re-use in accordance with Public Sector Information and open government initiatives
• to provide citizens with free access to the weather observational and forecast data and visualizations
• to design and implement new ways of displaying and visualizing datasets and metadata, tailored on the user’s needs
• to identify viable business models that can support a sustainable usage of weather datasets and the valorization of Italian weather public institutions resources in European repositories, in a trans-national perspective