The final event of the MISTRAL project – part of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Program, Telecommunications Sector – took place on Monday 23 November 2020, aimed at presenting the MISTRAL – Meteo Italian SupercompuTing poRtAL platform – for sharing, publishing and exporting meteorological data, and whose partners are: CINECA, Dipartimento di Protezione Civile, Centro Europeo per le Previsioni a Medio Termine, Agenzia Regionale per la Protezione Ambientale dell’Emilia-Romagna, Arpa Piemonte, Dedagroup Public Services. The event, with an audience of 170 attendees, was characterized by a first introductory part dedicated to the project and the platform used and to the presentation of a perspective report on the long-term sustainability of the platform, which gave rise to interesting reflections. The event ended with a Q&A session that made the online event very “real” and concrete. Below some of the main contents emerged during the event.
The MISTRAL platform responds to a real need of the country to collect and homogeneously present the wealth of meteorological data, numerical forecasts and processing tools from an Opendata and user service perspective. As Carlo Cacciamani pointed out in his speech, the initiative takes place at a time of important renewal, with the birth of a new national and regional technological / scientific “ecosystem”, full of opportunities.
Among the main innovations introduced it is certainly worth highlighting Mistral is the first platform in Italy that aggregates, harmonizes and makes available in a homogeneous way, using international standards, the observed data of the ground stations of the Italian regions. At the moment, 11 regions, in addition to the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, have given their consent to provide data to the platform that makes available also the data of the forecast products of Italy (at a resolution of 2.2 km) and the Mediterranean (at 5 km). Another important innovation, is the creation of a new forecast product called Italy Flash Flood, developed by ECMWF with the main objective of improving the forecast of flash floods.
The goal of the MISTRAL portal is to facilitate and encourage the reuse of data sets by the meteorological community, as well as its communities, and to improve the interoperability of regional meteorological data providers thanks to the adoption of international standards. The portal of MISTRL is already online, Cineca updates it periodically as new features and data are made available. However, it will be completed by the end of January 2021. The portal is designed to have a national character, with observed data, forecasts and customized services at national level.
Among the use cases presented there was the Multimodel Superensemble, that is a post-processing method of forecasting models aimed at obtaining a more accurate forecast of meteorological parameters near the ground which makes it possible to build an overall forecast, which takes into account the different contributions of the modeling, adequately “weighted”. Its main features are the forecast accuracy on the reference stations and the flexibility, i.e. the ease with which both meteorological models and ground stations can be added (thus expanding the area of use).
For further information visit: https://www.mistralportal.it/what-future-for-the-national-meteorological-portal-mistral/