Climate Data IT: Towards a National Data Hub for Climate Science

The increasing urgency to understand, predict, and mitigate the impact of climate change requires the integration of advanced Earth system modeling with computational and data science tools. Earth System Models (ESMs) are fundamental to this attempt, providing integrated models to simulate the interconnected behavior of atmospheric systems, oceans, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere. However, the growing complexity, resolution, and computational intensity of these models require robust support from hybrid HPC systems and digital infrastructures capable of handling exascale data volumes and simulation demands. This paper highlights the work carried out within the context of the Earth & Climate spoke of the Italian National Centre on High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing (ICSC). In particular, it describes the software infrastructure that underpins the development of Climate Data IT, which is the first attempt to create a petascale-order data platform for climate scientists. This platform serves major community experiments such as CORDEX and CMIP. According to a co-design approach, it brings together infrastructure and technology providers, as well as modeling groups, at a national level.