About us
The data existed. Reading it did not.
Isobar started when a hydrology group needed forty years of hourly precipitation at two hundred points and was quoted six months.
Origin
Chunking is the whole problem
Model output is written for the forecaster: one field, one time step, one file. Almost every scientific question wants the transpose — one point, every time step. Storing both layouts costs a lot of disk and saves a lot of years, so we did that.
- Both chunkings kept for every dataset that justifies it
- Original GRIB retained byte-identical
- Cycles kept after the originating centre deletes them
One model, one university
ERA5 rechunked for hydrology.
Operational ingest
Cycles online within the hour.
Ensembles
All members, not just the control.
Twelve-minute lag
Streaming ingest replaces batch.
18.2 PB
Nine centres, 9.1 TB a day.
How we work
Boring on purpose
We would rather run software that is three years old and understood than something new that pages us at 04:00.
Own the path
We buy transit from multiple carriers and peer directly wherever it is possible, so a single bad hop is never a single point of failure.
Write it down
Every incident gets a public write-up. Every design decision gets an RFC. Institutional memory beats heroics.
Some of the people behind it
A quarter of the company has been here since the first rack.
We are hiring
Remote-first across EU time zones, with a small office network for people who prefer one.