The ECOMS User Data Gateway: Towards seasonal forecast data provision and research reproducibility in the era of Climate Services

Sectorial applications of seasonal forecasting require data for a reduced number of variables from different datasets, mainly (gridded) observations, reanalysis, and predictions from state-of-the-art seasonal forecast systems (such as NCEP/CFSv2, ECMWF/System4 or UKMO/GloSea5). Whilst this information can be obtained directly from the data providers, the resulting formats, temporal aggregations, and vocabularies may not be homogeneous across datasets. Moreover, different data policies hold for the different databases, being only some of them publicly available. Therefore, obtaining and harmonizing multi-model seasonal forecast data for sector-specific applications is an error-prone, time consuming task.