Met Office and partners offer data and compute platform for COVID-19 researchers
By: Theo Mccaie
Tags: Data, Pangeo, Covid 19, Open Data, Informatics Lab

As we all know there are millions of dedicated frontline workers fighting day to day to protect us from COVID-19; legions of people putting themselves at risk to put food on our plates, keep our lights on etc; and behind the scenes, an army of researchers and scientists trying to provide the insight and information that will save lives. To the first two groups, we offer our thanks; to the second our data and technical expertise.

The Met Office Informatics Lab, with support from Microsoft and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), has curated a set of Met Office data and tools to help look for relationships between COVID-19 and environmental factors. To support this we can also offer access to a compute platform for any researcher who requires it.

We are working hard to grow our offering so please subscribe to our mailing list if you are keen to receive updates on new datasets, compute resources, help and support, or anything else.

The Data

The data comes from the Met Office’s world-leading weather forecasts and incorporates millions of observations from around the world. This is kindly hosted and made freely available by Microsoft AI for Earth and is released under an Open Government Licence. More details can be found in the public access Aure Blob Store Container (storage account: metdatasa, container:covid19-response), the README or index.html is a good place to start but briefly, the dataset comprises:

Hourly and daily global gridded weather data

Variables include air temperature, precipitation, shortwave radiation (sunshine), specific humidity

Regional aggregations of this data for administrative zones in the UK, Italy and USA and likely more to come.

Shapefiles for the above administrative zones

Air quality metrics for the UK.

Additionally, we’ve added a historic dataset of UK weather that might be useful for understanding pre-COVID behaviours or understanding changes. this is available under a non-commercial license. It’s produced in the same way as the data above so should provide a useful comparative tool. See the non-commercial data README to view the license and get started with this data.

We will continue to update the dataset so subscribe to our mailing list to stay informed.

The Platform

Update (2/8/20): As of Wednesday 16th September, we are providing all data via our download website only and retiring our interactive analysis platform. However, if you would like an interactive analysis environment please contact us at covid19@informaticslab.co.uk and we can advise and facilitate.

To support this endeavour, if researchers require access to customisable compute environments, we have created (again with the support of Microsoft AI for Earth) an instance of Pangeo that we will open up to them.

This platform runs Jupyter Lab IDE with fully customisable kernels (R and Python provided as default), easy access to the data, plenty of examples and a supportive community.

To get access please:

email covid19@informaticslab.co.uk from your organisation/institutional email address.

Provide your GitHub username (you’ll need to create one if you don’t have one already)

Briefly state your research aim/objective

If you have any questions, contact us on covid19@informaticslab.co.uk or post in the Pangeo discourse.

Examples

You can find a range of examples of using this data either on the platform or in our examples and docs repository.

Can we help?

A good start but not quite what you need? Let us know if you think we can help. Drop us a line at covid19@informaticslab.co.uk

Stay safe!