The challenges of developing an open source, standards-based technology stack to deliver the latest UK climate projections

Abstract

To improve the understanding of local and regional effects of climate change, the UK government supported the development of new climate projections. The Met Office Hadley Centre produced a sophisticated set of probabilistic projections for future climate. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an interactive website to deliver those projections to a broad user community. The interface presents complex data sets, generates on-the-fly products and schedules jobs to an offline weather generator capable of outputting gigabytes of data in response to a single request. A robust and scalable physical architecture was delivered through significant use of open source technologies and open standards.