Fetch Climate is a project that is aimed to simplify the process of climate variables fetching for ecological, biological modeling and other research areas which need the climate variable values.

It is deployed as a Windows Azure cloud service. Recent realization supports a fetching of mean values for a number of climate variables (e.g. near surface air temperature, precipitation rate, etc.) from a set of widely used climate datasets. All climate datasets are stored in the cloud as well.

Domain scientist who uses Fetch Climate doesn't need to perform effective climate data fetching and aggregation in her own code as it is performed by Fetch Climate.

Distinguishing feature of the Fetch Climate is an automated datasource choosing for each particular request. The datasource choice is performed by analyzing of the estimated uncertainties of the results, that can be calculated with a different datasources.

One more unique feature of the service is an ability to provide the estimated uncertainty for the result. The uncertainty can be used in further uncertainty estimation of a model that uses FetchClimate.

One can use .NET API to make a requests with FetchClimate. Apart of that a Web application Climate Explorer is being developed in our lab now. With the Climate Explorer one can view a spatial distribution of some climate variable over an area of interest. Or It is possible to fetch timeseries and investigate the temporal variation of the climate variables. You can try your own Fetch Climate requests with the Climate Explorer at fetchclimate.cloudapp.net

The Fetch Climate is being currently used by Computational  Ecology and Environmental Sciences group of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

FetchClimate cloud application

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FetchClimate calculation engine is being developed by Dmitry Grechka.

Climate Exporer silverlight app is developed by Dmitry Gryzunov.

All work and research is carried out under supervision of Sergey Berezin (head of MSTLAB), Vassily Lyutsarev (MSR Cambridge) and Drew Purves (MSR Cambridge) in collaboration with Computational Ecology and Environmental Sciences group of MSR Cambridge. 

FetchClimate idea was conceived by Drew Purves and Vassily Lyutsarev.

The project was supported by Microsoft Research Connections.