Data management has become a critical activity for research as the volume and number of data sets is growing exponentially. The discovery, access and exploitation of these data have turned into major challenges in order to enable effective research. ESPRI has been created to pool and centralize environmental and climate data, which are used massively by the IPSL community. Thus, ESPRI hosts, manages and processes various databases.

The IPSL data archive is indeed of multiple sources and volumes:

  • in situ observations,
  • satellite observations,
  • campaign databases,
  • numerical simulations,
  • analyses and reanalyses.

These multi-thematic data describe various realms of the Earth system such as atmospheric dynamics and chemistry, ocean dynamics and biogeochemistry, land surfaces, hydrology, sea and land-ice, paleo-climate, among other data.

One of the specificities of ESPRI lies in the fact that IPSL is both producer and consumer of the data. The ESPRI group aims at managing the data produced by the IPSL community while making data from other centres available as well. This multi-source approach allows ESPRI users to carry out multi-models and multi-sensors analyses by combining ground, satellite and/or model data.

But ESPRI does more than just duplicating data archives existing elsewhere. Indeed, the ESPRI’s added value also rely on:

  • the standardization of data formats (e.g. NetCDF),
  • the provision of extraction and visualization tools,
  • the provision of computing resources close to the data which avoids heavy data transfers.

The service level provided by ESPRI significantly varies depending on the dataset. It ranges from the provision of bare storage space (without any other associated services) to a complete support of the data life cycle within dedicated workflows. Those workflows are developed within the framework of Data Management Plans (DMPs) built at the national, European or international levels.

ESPRI thus provides transparent access to multi-source archives allowing the cross-referencing of the different types of data.

Data Citation


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Climate simulations


Within the IPSL Data Centre, ESPRI-Mod team ensures the link between French climate modeling scientists, the data they produce and/or need and use in support of the objectives of the IPSL Climate Modeling Centre (ICMC).

Earth observations


Within the IPSL Data Centre, ESPRI-Obs team offers expertise and services around the management, valorization and processing of observational and reanalysis data in support of the objectives of the IPSL Centre of Earth Observation (ICEO).

Energy for climate Data Hub


The interdisciplinary Energy4Climate (E4C) Datahub is a digital platform allowing easy access to climate and energy data.

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Data Archive