Centre for Earth Observation (CEO)

The EC are funding a distributed network for the dissemination of Earth observation data in Europe called the Centre for Earth Observation (CEO). The name is an anomaly - it will not be a 'centre' to any great extent, apart from some of the management which may well be centralised at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy. Earth Observation in this context includes atmosphere, oceans and land-use. The CEO covers not only academic but also commercial use of the data. A prime aim is to increase the use of EO data. Approx. 85 Mecus has been allocated for CEO - so it's important we take a role in making sure the money gets spent well! (There may even be money in it for us, so read on!).

So far, the CEO team at JRC have commissioned a number of studies to help them design the CEO. RAL and Hadley Centre have been involved in a consortium to determine user requirements for the 'Global Change - Atmospheres' community. As part of this, RAL has set up a trial WWW page for the CEO and we'd like comments on it please! There's a bottle of champagne for the most complete feedback form! The trial runs until 21st August so log onto the following WWW address quick! http://www.badc.rl.ac.uk then choose the CEO demonstrator option.

As part of the next stage, JRC have funded 3 teams to do a design of the CEO. There is a 'non-profit research organisation' team which RAL is leading. The other 2 teams are the software engineering team and the commercial companies teams. We are half way through this study; much of the debate is centred on how much effort goes into the 'software engineering' of an impressive interface to the same old data as opposed to the possibility of spending a significant amount of money on (a) making available data that has been collected but at present can't easily be accessed, and (b) producing higher level products (e.g. merging datasets, assimilating data into models etc.).

I hope you agree that it's very important that we take an active part in the CEO and help to ensure that it goes in the right direction and that the money is spent wisely. One of the things our team will probably recommend is that a small number of high profile activities are undertaken e.g. choose a dataset that a large section of the community would like to access (or at least recognise the importance of it), do whatever is required to make it an extremely attractive, easy-to-use dataset and advertise it as a flagship dataset. We need suggestions - please get in touch with me if you have any good ideas.

Finally, there will be a call for proposals for the funding of CEO-related work NEXT MARCH. The guidelines have not been written yet, but there may be possibilities for data work including development of higher level products and the rescuing or revisiting of old datasets that nevertheless have value for climate change. I'll keep you posted when I get more details.

Lesley Gray

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