Espri

Ensemble des Services pour la Recherche à l'IPSL

Data access and preservation:

The repository has an explicit mission to provide access to and preserve data in its domain

The IPSL federation has different missions among them to develop and propose a set of regional, national and international computing and data services for research related to environmental and climate science. To fulfill these missions, ESPRI has been mandated by IPSL to administrate IT systems, network and manage life-cycle of data from the IPSL Climate Modeling Center (CMC) and Center for Earth Observation (CEO). They cover various fields regarding aspects of the data life cycle such as:

  • data acquisition or production, 
  • data archiving and preservation,
  • data sharing and distribution,
  • support of multidisciplinary projects carried out at IPSL. 

There is no global mission statement as ESPRI is by construction a component of IPSL. However, the official mission statements of the 3 accredited platforms that make up ESPRI are available on the websites of Sorbonne University and CNRS, which have approved them in their entirety.

For more than twenty years, ESPRI has organized the access for the IPSL laboratories and their partners to different observational datasets as well as to numerical simulations via a central data repository infrastructure. It is easily accessible along with HPC computing facilities to make data analysis easier.

The different missions of ESPRI can be explained as follows :

  • the data management of the IPSL community and partners : ESPRI develops services that encompass different aspects of the data lifecycle, from building a data archive, through data processing, to data curation ;
  • to provide data dissemination and distribution through dedicated data portals. Various distribution services are set up by ESPRI to distribute and disseminate data using various standard protocols ;
  • to provide data access along with HPC computing facilities;
  • to preserve the data and metadata integrity and access over time.

ESPRI services centralize many different data products of interest for the earth-science community (satellite products, ground-based dataset, operational analyses and forecasts, climate model simulations). Thus, ESPRI engineers harmonize the development of a mutualized and multi-site data analysis platform and work in close relationship with scientific teams, allowing them to understand and to take into account their requirements efficiently.

ESPRI services ensure a solid and constant support to the French climate research, by preserving an attentive listening to the different research teams of IPSL and its partners. This approach also allows to create scientific synergies in order to collect the new needs of the community and propose original and structuring computing services.

ESPRI services have been labeled by the CNRS as well as by Sorbonne University. Technical resources operated within certain laboratories such as IPSL are open to a larger external audience, allowing a wider use of their resources, including – in some cases – outside of academic structures. These platforms bring together equipment, software and human resources that provide high-level technical expertise to support research activities. This label is provided by a national commission established by the CNRS-INSU.

ESPRI is registered with the CNRS/INIST as a DataCite DOI supplier. As such, ESPRI has a contractual obligation to guarantee the integrity of metadata, to maintain access to data and metadata, to respect Datacite metadata schemas and to ensure data quality control in accordance with the standards of its research community.

Finally, ESPRI acts as a key stakeholder in two national Research Infrastructures sustaining their respective missions : 

  • AERIS/DATA-TERRA generates products from observations and support services for data access, helps to conduct campaigns, or interface with models.

CLIMERI-France-France aims at carrying out international numerical simulations programmed within the framework of the WCRP at global and regional scales and to make their results available to various users.