UK Met Office: COVID-19 Response

Abstract:

In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic reached Europe, many requests were being made to provide meteorological data to researchers exploring the link between aspects of the pandemic and the environment. In response the UK Met Office started provisioning pseudo-reanalysis meteorological and air quality data on Microsoft Azure cloud storage, as well as deploying a data analysis platform, based on Pangeo, to provide collaborators with flexible compute capacity. This talk will describe what we learned, how we provisioned data and spun up a platform on a very short timeframe, and the challenges and scientific findings that resulted.