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> The data is output from a climate model run that is constrained to match weather observations.

That's interesting. Why store it? Why not compute it as needed using the model?

FWIW, I am not an expert in this space and if someone is, it would be good to understand it.

It's a good question! It's true that the output is massive, I believe ~9 petabytes and growing. But running the model is super expensive. It runs on ECMWF's supercomputer. Not sure how many cores but I would guesstimate in the 10k - 100k core range just for one instance. So computing the data on the fly is super expensive, probably much more expensive than just storing it.

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