Meet the Partner: Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Co-producing Climate and Air Quality Services Tailored to Societal Needs

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain and one of the key HPC institutions in Europe. It hosts MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers on the continent, is a founding member of the former PRACE infrastructure, and the current hosting entity for EuroHPC JU.

BSC's mission is to research, develop, and manage advanced computing technologies to accelerate scientific progress. It integrates high-performance computing service provision with research in computer and computational sciences, spanning life, earth, and engineering disciplines. With over 1,000 staff from more than 60 countries, it fosters international collaboration and cross-sector innovation.

Within BSC, the Earth Sciences Department is one of Europe’s leading research groups in air quality, atmospheric composition modelling, and climate prediction. The Earth System Services research group focuses on co-producing climate and air quality services and supporting knowledge and technology of state-of-the-art transfer across scientific and policy communities at local, national, and international levels. It collaborates with public authorities, civil society organisations, international research networks, and private companies to create operational and semi-operational forecast services on climate, air quality, and airborne dust, and cutting-edge forecasting services tailored to societal needs.

🔗 Learn more: bsc.es

BSC’s Role in UrbanAIR

In UrbanAIR, BSC oversees the development and evaluation of data fusion and super-resolution methods that improve urban-scale assessments of air quality and heat. These methods incorporate observational data with different levels of associated uncertainty. This will render a non-blurring, street-level, data-based air quality/urban heat model adapted to incorporate satellite and sparse ground sensor observations.

Moreover, BSC partners with VITO to lead the co-production with users of the UrbanAIR services. This involves working directly with both stakeholders in Barcelona and Antwerp and with scientists and platform developers across the project consortium to: 

• understand how the UrbanAIR tools can match real-world needs; 

• develop and test prototypes; and 

• assess the value and usability of UrbanAIR’s digital twin tools.

The BSC Team

• Jan Mateu Armengol – Principal Investigator

• Sam Pickard – Researcher

• Cristina Carnerero – Researcher

• Álvaro Criado Romero – Researcher

• Florence Gignac – Researcher

• Arianna Cristiani – Project Manager

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