Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), formed in 2005, has a mission to research, develop and manage information technology in order to facilitate scientific progress. The BSC, more than 500 people from 40 different countries perform and facilitate research in Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computational Applications in Science and Engineering. The BSC is one of the four hosting members of the European PRACE Research Infrastructure.
The Earth Sciences Department of the BSC (ES-BSC) was established with the objective of carrying out research in Earth system modelling, and focuses its activity on emissions, air quality, mineral dust and global and regional climate modelling and prediction. ES-BSC is organized around four closely interacting groups (Atmospheric Composition, Climate Prediction, Computational Earth Sciences, and Earth System Services) comprising ~100 employees, including scientific, technical, and support staff. The department is an active member of the EC-Earth consortium, whose Earth System Model is widely used at ES-BSC for research and teaching purposes.
The Atmospheric Composition (AC) Group aims at better understanding and predicting the spatiotemporal variations of atmospheric pollutants along with their effects upon air quality, weather and climate, and will be the group directly involved in CoCO2. The group has a wide experience in running operational atmospheric forecasting systems and delivering timely and quality forecasts, observations, information and knowledge to users. The group currently hosts the CALIOPE air quality forecast system, the Barcelona Dust Forecast Center and the WMO Regional Center Northern Africa-Middle East-Europe for the Sand and Dust Storm Warning Advisory and Assessment System (SDS-WAS).
BSC contribution to the CoCO2 project will be mostly focussed on WP2 Prior and ancillary information to support the development of state-of-the-art emission data for other WPs. More specifically, BSC will contribute to the combination of regional emission inventories and the development of global fossil emission datasets by using the in-house HERMES emission modelling tool. Moreover, BSC will lead the task on improving emission temporal profiles for key sectors (e.g. road transport, point sources, residential heating), and will also provide expert knowledge and methodology for the improvement of the spatial proxies for mapping emissions. Additionally, BSC will have an advisory role in WP3 Global Modelling and data assimilation for the implementation in the IFS system of the temporal profiles and emission parametrizations developed in WP2.