National Supercomputing Centre, Department of Earth Sciences
BSC participates in the Central Facility related to the Data Centre in the DVAS (Data Discovery, Virtual Access and Services) Unit.
The National Supercomputing Centre (BSC) is the Spanish national supercomputing facility and host member of the PRACE distributed supercomputing infrastructure. The centre hosts MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. The BSC's mission is to research, develop and manage information technologies to facilitate scientific and social progress.
The Earth Sciences Department is one of the four BSC departments and has the goal to apply the latest advances of high-performance computing and big data to earth system modelling. The department is organized around four closely interacting groups: Climate Prediction, Computational Earth Sciences, Earth Sciences Services, and Atmospheric Composition, which is the group involved in this proposal.
The Atmospheric Composition group aims to better understand the chemical composition of the atmosphere and its effects on air quality, weather and climate, while improving predictions from local to global scales. This objective is addressed through the development and use of the NMMB/BSC Chemical Transport Model, a multi-scale non-hydrostatic non-hydrostatic chemical transport on-line weather prediction system that can be run on global or regional scales and includes aerosol data assimilation. A core activity of the group is the modelling and forecasting of mineral dust from regional to global scales. As a result of this experience, the BSC hosts, in collaboration with the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET), the Regional Centre for North Africa, the Middle East and Europe of the WMO Sand and Dust Storm Warning Assessment and Advisory System (SDS-WAS), and the first WMO Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre with specialised activity in Sand and Atmospheric Dust Forecasting, known as the Barcelona Dust Forecasting Centre. In ACTRIS, the Atmospheric Composition group is part of the Data Discovery, Virtual Access and Data Centre Services unit, in particular in charge of the generation of Tier 3 products by merging quality assured ACTRIS products with products from other infrastructures.
