Open data at Copernicus Climate Change Service

One of the most innovative aspect of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union, is arguably the Copernicus licence which allows the free and unrestricted exploitation of the data for any sort of application. Whilst such an approach was already common practice in some climate change applications, providing seasonal predictions for free could have profound implications on users' ability to develop value-added sectoral services especially in the tropical regions. Opening the data to this sort of exploitation is not simply a political/philosophical decision as it requires the development of an infrastructure able to efficiently serve a big volume of data and engage with a potentially high number of concurrent users request. Here we present the basic design of the Copernicus Climate Data Store and show how this new infrastructure will help support open data in the climate services arena by providing an efficient way of using and post-processing large datasets without the need of downloading huge amounts of data.