ECMWF has published the challenges for its third Summer of Weather Code (ESoWC). Applicants have until 22 April 2020 to submit proposals for weather- and climate-related projects that address the challenges of handling large amounts of data and transforming it into information.
ECMWF’s Summer of Weather Code connects individuals or teams with experienced mentors and experts in weather, climate, machine learning and cloud computing to develop open-source software. This year up to 15 proposals will be selected for coding over the summer (May–August) ready for presentation at the showcase day at ECMWF on 18 September.
Successful projects may be eligible for grants of £5,000 and/or Amazon Web Services (AWS) or WEkEO cloud credits.
ESoWC 2020 challenges
The ESoWC 2020 challenges are listed on GitHub under three streams:
- Stream 1: Weather-related software and applications
Challenges include developing interactive analysis tools for visualising IFS performance data, and creating a new set of interactive online training materials for scientific training courses, based on OpenIFS and Jupyter notebooks in the cloud. - Stream 2: Machine learning and artificial intelligence
Challenges include exploring machine/deep learning techniques to detect and track tropical cyclones, and finding an optimal number of vertical model levels to represent atmospheric trace gases. - Stream 3: Cloud-based weather and climate innovations
Open for applicants to submit project ideas that use ECMWF or Copernicus data and need cloud processing resources to process the data.
“New this year are our partnership with Copernicus and Amazon Web Services and the increase in the number of projects we can select,” says Esperanza Cuartero, one of the programme’s organisers. “The challenges proposed are very promising, with a strong emphasis on machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
More information
- Full details about the programme are available on the ESoWC website.
- You can follow the programme on Twitter @esowc_ecmwf and #ESoWC2020.
- Find out what the teams achieved in the 2019 Summer of Weather Code.