Partly driven by COVID-related lockdowns, ECMWF has moved to virtual or hybrid training. In this scenario, it has been demonstrated that the EWC can provide support for the practical and hands-on sessions through virtual classrooms. The flexibility of the system means that Member States can also use the EWC as an infrastructure to run their own training.
EUMETSAT also runs virtual courses using the EWC, through which participants can more easily practise using EUMETSAT data by accessing virtual machines – computers with faster processing power, and more memory and storage than they would normally have access to. During the training courses for meteorologists as part of its International Summer School 2022, EUMETSAT provided ten virtual machines in the EWC. In addition, participants used virtual machines to access and run Jupyter notebooks, enabling them to display data from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites quickly and easily.
The German meteorological service, Deutscher Wetterdienst, used the EWC during the 2020 edition of its training course on the ICON model – the German weather forecast model. Using the EWC made the practical part of the training session, when the numerous participants used the model themselves to forecast the weather and put into practice what they had learned during the lectures, go more smoothly.
