Celebrating 30 years of the Centre for Environmental data Analysis

Posted on November 29, 2024  (Last modified on December 3, 2024) • 5 min read • 1,025 words

On Monday 25th November 2024, we held a celebration event to mark the 30th anniversary of the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). The event was a great success, with over 70 people attending.

The event kicked off with a presentation about our history and successes  from Phil Kershaw (Head of CEDA) and Sam Pepler (Head of Curation). Attendees learned our journey from a small data facility with 3 staff members and minimal data storage, to our current team of 39 staff and over 50 petabytes of disk storage.

After a networking lunch, we had a session consisting of themed stands - showcasing 8 distinct aspects of the work we do. This gave attendees an opportunity to interact with staff and explore the diverse work that we undertake.

Lots of people may only be aware of one key area of our work, with this event we wanted to highlight all the amazing work we do across teams, organisations, countries and projects. The Land of CEDA (shown below)  is a fun way to re-imagine our work as a fantasy island which depicts key aspects of our work as features on the landscape.

Below are the 8 themes we highlighted at the event, with short descriptions and links to additional resources. You can also read our annual report for detailed examples of our work. 

Connect  

We work with a lot of different communities not just to learn and work collaboratively with them but also to share our expertise. We run training events, attend conferences, offer advice and much more.

  Explore pages 1-2 for further details about the ‘Connect’ theme. 

Curate  

One key service we manage is the CEDA Archive  , an environmental data archive that holds over 25 petabytes of data. Our role is to coordinate data management, on behalf of NERC, for the UK atmospheric science and earth observation communities.

You can see some common data workflows through the archive on our poster here.  If you’re a researcher and have questions about data management, please contact us: data.management@ceda.ac.uk

  Explore pages 4-5 for further details about the ‘Curate’ theme. 

Relate  

We have lots of different funders and host organisations. This means we often have to ‘wear different hats’ and use 7+ logos!

Keeping track of these relationships can be tricky- even for our staff. So it’s no surprise that most people who are familiar with CEDA aren’t aware of these different relationships.

  The poster on page 3 covers the ‘Relate’ theme  - showing our immediate UKRI connections (note: external partners are covered by ‘Facilitate’ theme). One of our aims of this event was to communicate these intertwined relationships and the work we do for them in a digestible, and understandable way.

Facilitate  

Our relationships are not just limited to within UKRI, we work with a lot of external partners: helping facilitate programs, running huge collaborative projects, and helping create integrated services across organisations.

  Explore page 6 for further details about the ‘Facilitate’ theme. 

Technical  

The CEDA team is filled with technical experts responsible for maintaining and running the JASMIN data analysis facility  and the long-term CEDA Archive.  Whilst our core goal is making sure our services are up and running for everyone to use, we also want to make them as easy and user-friendly as possible to help enable environmental research - both of which require extensive technical knowledge.

We aim to be open about the technical aspects of our work, both to improve transparency so our users can easily understand the reasoning behind our decisions and to share learnings with others running similar data facilities. Our tech blog covers more in-depth articles  about our work.

  Explore page 7 for further details about the ‘Technical’ theme. 

Net Zero  

We have a so-called “elephant in the room”, which is that JASMIN requires a large amount of energy to run, using the energy equivalent of ~550 small homes annually. How can we ensure that the work we are supporting and enabling with our services is worth the energy we’re using?

A few years ago we ran a scoping project which provided nearly 200 evidence-based recommendations for UKRI to achieve their goal of net zero digital research infrastructure  by 2040. We are also always looking for ways we can reduce our energy consumption, with things like moving our data onto tape storage which requires significantly less energy.

  You can find out more about our work towards net zero on pages 8-9 of our posters. 

Co-create  

When running and creating services, we try to follow user-centred design, which ensures that we are focussing on users and their needs by creating usable and accessible tools. This is often an iterative process, requiring consultation and feedback with potential future users.

Another important aspect is collaboration: as one of 5 data centres making up the Environmental Data Service, how can we best pool our knowledge, share expertise, and work together effectively to create reliable user-centric technologies?

  Read more about our ‘Co-create’ theme on pages 10-11. 

Outreach  

It’s important to share the work we do and the impact the science we support has on our planet. However, our reach is often limited to the academic communities we are already a part of. We work closely with our partner public engagement teams to explore new ways to promote our work, inspire others, and share our message with the wider public.

  One example is the climate mosaic pictured at the beginning of this article and the ‘Outreach’ theme is further detailed on page 12. 

Find out more about our outreach activities, including how to make your very own climate stripes for any location.

If you would like to discuss any of these areas of work with the team, we’d be happy to set up an online meeting. Please contact us to request this: support@ceda.ac.uk