Open weather and climate science in the digital era

The need for open science has been recognized by the communities of meteorology and climate science. While these domains are mature in terms of applying digital technologies, the implementation of open science methodologies is less advanced. In a session on “Weather and Climate Science in the Digital Era” at the 14th IEEE International eScience Conference domain specialists and data and computer scientists discussed the road towards open weather and climate science. Roughly 80 % of the studies presented in the conference session showed the added value of open data and software. These studies included open datasets from disparate sources in their analyses or developed tools and approaches that were made openly available to the research community. Furthermore, shared software is a prerequisite for the studies which presented systems like a model coupling framework or digital collaboration platform. Although these studies showed that sharing code and data is important, the consensus among the participants was that this is not sufficient to achieve open weather and climate science and that there are important issues to address. At the level of technology, the application of the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) principles to many datasets used in weathe