AERIS/ICARE in a nutshell

ICARE Mission

ICARE Data and Services Center provides services to the science community to facilitate access to and utilization of satellites and ground-based observations of atmospheric aerosols and clouds properties, water cycle, and radiation. Its mission is to support research studies in atmospheric and climate sciences. ICARE partners with French and worldwide experts in these research fields and with the international space agencies (CNES, NASA, ESA, EUMETSAT, ISRO, etc.).
ICARE is one of the 4 data centers of AERIS , the French Data Infrastructure for the Atmosphere created in 2014. ICARE contributes to numerous national and international collaborative projects (MACC, IAOOS, ORAURE, ROSEA, CaPPA, GEWEX, CHARMEX, ACTRIS, CCI, AEROCLUB, GAIA-CLIM, …).
ICARE is supported by the CNES and the Hauts-de-France Regional Council as part of a partnership with the University of Lille and the CNRS.

Main activities

  • Collect, process, archive, and distribute data
  • Develop data visualization and analysis tools
  • Develop operational processing codes
  • Provide support to atmospheric science users with dedicated human and hardware resources

Specific expertise

  • Exploit the rich satellites data records
  • Combine the various observations to derive geophysical parameters
  • Provide easy online access to products

Figures (January 2020)

ICARE hosts a very large computing system, located at the at the IT department of Lille University:

  • 1300 referenced data sets available online (3765 TB archive)
  • 350 data sets collected daily
  • 950 derived products and associated quicklooks generated routinely
  • 90 processing codes
  • Incoming daily rate of 1.1 TB, total daily increase of the archive: 1.4 TB/day (ingest and production)
  • 136 million files archived
  • 124 servers, 2174 cores, 247 CPU (for production, services, and cluster)
  • 18,000 cores-days of computation in 2019
  • 43,000 visits per month by about 17,000 unique visitors
  • 3417 registered users for data access
  • 196 registered users for computer resources access

Source of funding

  • CNES
  • Hauts-de-France Regional Council
  • National projects (AllEnvi, MEDD, ADEME, INSU…)
  • European projects (EU, ESA, EUMETSAT)

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