IS-ENES

IS-ENES
Name	IS-ENES
Formation	2007
Type	Research infrastructure consortium
Location	Europe
Region served	Europe
Leader title	Coordinator

IS-ENES

IS-ENES is a European research infrastructure consortium that coordinates modelling, data services, and software for the climate science community. It acts as a focal point linking major computational centres, data repositories, and modelling groups across European Union member states, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway and associated research institutions. IS-ENES supports interoperability between initiatives such as Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, IPCC, Copernicus Programme, Horizon 2020, and national research programmes.

Overview

IS-ENES operates at the interface of climate modelling, data management, and high-performance computing, connecting modelling centres like Met Office, Météo-France, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ECMWF and supercomputing facilities including PRACE, Jülich Research Centre, CINECA, and Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It facilitates the adoption of community standards such as CF Convention, NetCDF, ESGF and supports engagement with projects like CMIP6, CORDEX, ISIMIP and Copernicus Climate Change Service. The consortium collaborates with universities including University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, ETH Zurich, Sorbonne University and research labs such as UK Met Office Hadley Centre and French National Centre for Atmospheric Research.

History and Development

Founded in 2007, IS-ENES emerged from collaborations among European climate modelling groups that previously interacted through initiatives including ENES, PRUDENCE, ENSEMBLES, EURO-CORDEX and EARTH System Grid Federation. Early partners included KNMI, BSC, SMHI, INERIS and CERFACS. Subsequent funding and project phases involved FP7, Horizon 2020 and bilateral agreements with national agencies such as CNRS, DECC, DFG and INRIA. IS-ENES matured alongside international milestones including the Paris Agreement and successive IPCC Assessment Reports, adapting services to support model intercomparison exercises like CMIP5 and CMIP6 and observational comparisons with datasets from ECMWF ERA-Interim, ECMWF ERA5 and satellite missions from ESA and EUMETSAT.

Objectives and Activities

IS-ENES aims to harmonize model output, metadata and data access to enable robust climate research by groups at Max Planck Society, ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, University of Leeds, Università di Bologna and national meteorological services. Activities include development of community tools such as ESGF nodes, metadata conventions related to CF Convention, quality control with reference datasets like HadCRUT, and software components compliant with formats defined by NetCDF. The consortium promotes capacity building through workshops attended by staff from Met Office Hadley Centre, NOAA, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NERSC and research networks like EUMETNET and ECRA.

Infrastructure and Services

IS-ENES integrates distributed infrastructure elements: data nodes interoperating with Earth System Grid Federation, compute workflows targeting PRACE and national supercomputers such as ARCHER2, Fugaku, Mistral and LUMI, and data catalogues linked to Copernicus Climate Data Store. Services provide harmonized datasets used in CMIP6 analyses, bias correction workflows relevant to ISIMIP, and tools for provenance tracking compatible with W3C PROV standards. Operational collaborations involve data centres like Barcelon Supercomputing Center, CINECA, SARA Computing and Networking Services and observatories such as ICOS and ICOS ERIC.

Governance and Partnerships

The governance structure brings together principal investigators and institutional leads from organisations including CNRS, MPI-M, UK Met Office, SMHI and BSC. IS-ENES formalises partnerships with European programmes such as Horizon Europe, Copernicus, European Research Council projects, and international bodies like WMO and IPCC working groups. Funding and oversight have involved national ministries such as Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Poland), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany), and agencies like ADEME, ANR and UK Research and Innovation.

Projects and Impact

IS-ENES has contributed to major projects and produced community outputs used by teams at IPCC chapters, CMIP6 diagnostics groups, and sectoral impact projects including Impacts World, Drought Risk],] and Agricultural Modelling Intercomparison and Improvement Project. Its tools and datasets underpin publications from institutions like University of Exeter, Columbia University, Princeton University, ETH Zurich and University of Copenhagen and support policy-relevant assessments connected to the European Green Deal and regional initiatives such as EU Adaptation Strategy. The consortium’s work enhanced reproducibility for studies by groups at NASA, NOAA, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and contributed to training researchers in data stewardship used across EUMETSAT and ESA programmes.

Challenges and Future Directions

Challenges include scaling services to exascale systems at centres like LUMI, managing stewardship of petabyte-scale archives at ESGF nodes, integrating observations from satellite missions like Sentinel-3 and Sentinel-5P, and aligning with policy timelines driven by IPCC cycles and UNFCCC processes. Future directions emphasize tighter coupling with Earth system model development at MPI-M, Met Office, CNRM-CERFACS, expanded interoperability with FAIR principles advocated by GO FAIR, deployment of cloud-native services used by Copernicus Climate Change Service and fostering collaborations with industry partners such as cloud providers and HPC vendors including Atos, NVIDIA, Intel and Cray.

Category:European scientific organisations