DRIHM - An Infrastructure To Advance Hydro-Meteorological Research

Abstract

One of the main challenges in hydro-meteorological research (HMR) is predicting the impact of weather and climate changes on the environment, society and economy, including local severe hazards such as floods and landslides. At the heart of this challenge lies the ability to have easy access to hydro-meteorological data and models, and facilitate the collaboration across discipline boundaries. Within the DRIHM project (Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology, www.drihm.eu, EC funded FP7 project 2011-2015) we develop a prototype e-Science environment to facilitate this collaboration and provide end-to-end HMR services (models, datasets, and post-processing tools) at the European level, with the ability to expand to global scale. The objectives of DRIHM are to lead the definition of a common long-term strategy, to foster the development of new HMR models, workflows and observational archives for the study of severe hydro-meteorological events, to promote the execution and analysis of high-end simulations, and to support the dissemination of predictive models as decision analysis tools. For this we implement a service portal to construct heterogeneous simulation workflows that can include deterministic and ensemble runs on a heterogeneous infrastructure consisting of HPC, grid and Windows cloud resources. Via another FP7 project called DRIHM2US (www.drihm2us.eu) we collaborate with the NSF funded SCIHM project (www.scihm.org) to build a wider international collaborative network. This contribution will provide a sketch of the DRIHM architecture and show some use cases such as the November 2011 Genoa flooding