This project, Standards-based CyberInfrastructure for HydroMeteorology (SCIHM), seeks to link two disciplines--hydrology and meteorology--each of which has a sophisticated CI already developed within their respective disciplines. This linkage will be accomplished with hydrometeorology use cases in Europe and America that will be executed in both the European and American grid computing environments using federated data and computing standards. With research and development partners from several American and European institutions, the project is designed to take advantage of standards-based CI for hydrometeorological applications. In doing so, we will foster a unified standards-based hydrometeorological infrastructure where researchers and students from Europe and the US can rapidly simulate complex physical processes and predict extreme weather events and their hydrological, environmental and societal impacts, taking advantage of scalable on demand high-performance cloud-based computational resources and shared data space. Computational and storage layers will be seamlessly integrated with standards-based domain data services, analysis tools and models, enabling researchers and practitioners to quickly tune predictive models to their areas of interest, discover and access distributed sources of information, and engage in a collaborative analysis and interpretation of prediction results. This project will engage the broader hydrologic and meteorologic research community through CUAHSI and UCAR, the respective university consortia for these disciplines, as well as European partners.
The intellectual merit of this project is to identify current shortcomings in the workflow of existing community-based hydrometeorological prediction systems and to remedy those shortcomings through strategic cyberinfrastructure enhancements. There is presently a dire need for earth system scientists to have at their disposal computational systems that are accessible, extensible and scalable for a wide range of research and prediction problems. This project will directly link high-performance computing that supports standards- based management of advanced computing and storage resources, with distributed service-oriented cyberinfrastructure designs. Creating such a capability will permit better depiction of complex earth system processes in models, allow for improved characterization of model and data uncertainties and will greatly facilitate hypothesis testing, ultimately resulting in improved predictions.
One principle goal of this project is to vastly expand data access and computational access through standards-based cyberinfrastructure development. The broader impact of meeting this goal is placing powerful environmental prediction tools into the hands of researchers and decision makers around the world, in places where such capabilities simply cannot presently exist. The cyberinfrastructure enhancements delivered by this project will greatly streamline the hydrometeorological modeling process and accelerate cloud computing in the earth sciences. Development of this cyberinfrastructure within a rigorous standards-based environment will also encourage its adoption by operational government agencies which can directly benefit from it. Ultimately, the improved modeling capacity should drive improved predictive capabilities for floods and droughts by fostering a more accurate prediction system that captures the underlying physical and biological processes controlling water transport.
