Blue-Cloud addresses the IA ‘The Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative’ (BG-07-2019-2020) for the following topic: [A] 2019 - Blue Cloud services. The project implements a practical approach to address the potential of cloud based open science to achieve a set of services identifying also longer term challenges to build and demonstrate the Pilot Blue Cloud as a thematic EOSC cloud to support research to better understand & manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators. It seeks to capitalise on what exists already and to develop and deploy, through a pragmatic workplan, the pilot Blue Cloud as a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to: 1) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, 2) analytical tools, & 3) computing facilities essential for key blue science use cases. Outputs include: a Blue Cloud Framework, Data Discovery & Access Service (approx. 400 users) & VRE (approx. 1,000 users) from 25 countries, Blue Cloud Service Catalogue including 50+ services deployed through 5 compelling pilot demonstrators, A Blue Cloud 2030 implementation Policy Roadmap, Whitepaper on outcomes of the Food/Blue-Cloud Pilots to support the implementation of thematic EOSC, 4 focused Roadmap events & Workshops, 1 hackathon, 10 webinars, 1 Final results conference, engaged community with all stakeholder groups represented. Led by a consortium bringing together leading European marine data management infrastructures, EOSC horizontal e-infrastructures, and excellent marine researchers. Coordinated by a neutral ICT intensive SME with over 15 years’ experience, technically coordinated by a community leading marine & ocean data specialist, and supported by 17 experienced partners, from research, academia & industry, with strategic and practical involvement in design and delivery of blue community needs. An influential External Stakeholders Experts Board & an Expert Foresight Group support the project.

EOSC-Pillar gathers representatives of the fast-growing national initiatives for coordinating data infrastructures and services in Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Belgium to establish an agile and efficient federation model for open science services covering the full spectrum of European research communities. Our proposal aims to implement some of the main pieces of the EOSC jigsaw within a science-driven approach which is efficient, scalable and sustainable and that can be rolled out in other countries. National initiatives are the key of our strategy, for their capacity to attract and coordinate many elements of the complex EOSC ecosystem and for their sustainability, which will add resilience to the whole structure. We will combine these initiatives, who represent research communities in each country, with use cases of transnational networks working to implement FAIR data practices. Through the coordination of national initiatives, EOSC-Pillar will be able to support the gradual alignment of policy and practice among countries and compliance to EOSC standards. We are convinced that by federating national initiatives through common policies, FAIR services, shared standards, and technical choices, EOSC-Pillar will be a catalyst for science-driven transnational open data and open science services offered through the EOSC portal. These initiatives will emanate the promotion of FAIR data practices and services across scientific communities, sharing best practice, and igniting opportunities for interdisciplinary approaches in the EOSC. Above all, our vision is that national initiatives are key to involve user communities and research infrastructures both as test-beds for solutions, but also in their very design and sustainable evolution. For this reason, EOSC-Pillar’s workplan is built around selected user-driven pilots from 7 scientific domains, that will show EOSC in action and provide valuable input to guide the roll out of services for other communities.

The Data Infrastructure Capacities for EOSC (DICE) consortium brings together a network of computing and data centres, research infrastructures, and data repositories for the purpose to enable a European storage and data management infrastructure for EOSC, providing generic services and building blocks to store, find, access and process data in a consistent and persistent way. Specifically, DICE partners will offer 14 state-of-the-art data management services together with more than 50 PB of storage capacity. The service and resource provisioning will be accompanied by enhancing the current service offering in order to fill the gaps still present to the support of the entire research data lifecycle; solutions will be provided for increasing the quality of data and their re-usability, supporting long term preservation, managing sensitive data, and bridging between data and computing resources. All services provided via DICE will be offered through the EOSC Portal and interoperable with EOSC Core via a lean interoperability layer to allow efficient resource provisioning from the very beginning of the project. The partners will closely monitor the evolution of the EOSC interoperability framework and guidelines to comply with a) the rules of participation to onboard services into EOSC, and b) the interoperability guidelines to integrate with the EOSC Core functions. The data services offered via DICE through EOSC are designed to be agnostic to the scientific domains in order to be multidisciplinary and to fulfil the needs of different communities. The consortium aims to demonstrate their effectiveness of the service offering by integrating services with community platforms as part of the project and by engaging with new communities coming through EOSC.

NextGEMS will develop and apply a new generation of global coupled Storm-Resolving Earth System Models (SR-ESMs) to the study of anthropogenic climate change. SR-ESMs are distinguished by their fine, 3 km, grid in the atmosphere and ocean. This allows a more physical representation of atmospheric and oceanic circulation systems, including their coupling to Earth-system processes such as the carbon, nutrients, water and atmospheric particulate (aerosol) cycles. NextGEMS will develop two prototypes SR-ESMs into production systems and produce multi-decadal (30 y) projections of future climate change. Improved resolution is expected to reduce biases and enhance the realism of these simulations. Ensembles of simulations will address scientific puzzles such as the impact of convective organization on climate sensitivity, the magnitude of aerosol forcing, and the changes in extremes associated with tropical air-sea interaction (including the African Monsoon and Atlantic Hurricanes) and land-surface interaction in the mid-latitudes (dry-spells and links between hydrology and carbon). By developing models that are structurally different than existing ones, NextGEMS will reshape perceptions of uncertainty and provide a basis for reassessing the risk global warming poses for society and ecology. By focusing on just two models, NextGEMS builds a European community of scientists and users around a technologically more ambitious modelling enterprise. This concentration is needed if Europe is to maintain its position at the forefront of Earth-system modelling. By representing the scales of motion and driving forces of high impact weather globally, NextGEMS links more directly to applications, thereby shortening the value chain. Knowledge coproduction projects focusing on how circulation influences both solar energy production and marine nutrients will demonstrate how applications and downstream users can thus be directly integrated into the model development enterprise.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to develop a web of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data and services for science in Europe. In order to achieve a sustainable EOSC, Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs) providing long-term preservation services are required. The FIDELIS project aims to establish a healthy, vibrant and self-sustaining network of TDRs that will foster a supportive open science environment and guarantee FAIR data sharing also in the future. Within its three-year lifetime, FIDELIS will set up, develop, and operate a European network of trustworthy repositories that will support the development and growth of TDRs within the EOSC ecosystem; foster harmonisation and interoperability across repositories to enable an EOSC federation of TDRs; and strengthen the upskilling of repositories and expansion of the network through an active training and support programme. The word Fidelis comes from the latin Fides and means trustworthy, faithful, loyal, dependable, true. In Ancient Rome, Fides is everything that is required for honour and credibility, from fidelity in marriage, to contractual arrangements, and the obligation soldiers owed to Rome. It is also the name of the goddess of trust, faithfulness and good faith (bona fides).