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A stakeholder consultation into hydro-meteorological e-science environments

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report on and analyse an international consultation into hydro-meteorological e-Science environments with the objective of identifying key functions and features together with exploring show-stopping issues and organisational structure. Transatlantic experiences were compared and contrasted. Including strong participation from both Europe and the USA with high quality responses from experienced practitioners, the consultation was undertaken as part of a joint initiative and took the form of an online questionnaire supported by a set of stakeholder interviews and other discussions. Topics included were functions and features such as provision of numerical models and data, usability, and ease of access; show-stopping issues such as flexibility, reliability and longevity; centralised and distributed structures, and funding models. The results demonstrated a broadly similar set of experiences and implied a future as an evolution of that which exists today. The consultation exercise ran alongside the development of the DRIHM e-Infrastructure which had, in itself, already benefitted from the prior DRIHMS consultation. Results were fed in to the development process at appropriate intervals allowing the consultation to shape the resultant services.

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Abbreviations

BSD:

Berkeley Software Distribution

CESM:

Community Earth System Model project

CF:

Climate and Forecasting

CSDMS:

Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System

CUAHSI:

Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrological Science Incorporated

CUAHSI-HIS:

CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System

DRIHM:

Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology

DRIHMS:

Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology Study

DRIHM2US:

Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology to the USA

ESMF:

Earth System Modelling Framework

ECOOP:

European Coastal Operational Oceanography Project

EPA:

Environmental Protection Agency

FEWS:

Flood Early Warning System

FRAMES:

Framework for Risk Analysis of Multi-Media Environmental Systems

GUI:

Graphical User Interface

gUSE:

Grid and cloud User Support Environment

HMR:

Hydro-Meteorological Research

ICT:

Information and Communication Technology

LGPL:

Lesser General Public License

MoU:

Memorandum of Understanding

NetCDF:

Network Common Data Form

NWP:

Numerical Weather Prediction

OGC:

Open Geospatial Consortium

OpenMI:

Open Modelling Interface

SHIWA:

SHaring Interoperable Workflows for large-scale scientific simulations on Available DCIs

SLA:

Service Level Agreement

SDK:

Software Development Kit

WaterML:

Water Markup Language

WMO:

World Meteorological Organization

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Acknowledgements

The project team would like to acknowledge the time taken by all respondents in providing their feedback to the consultation process and the permission given for summary results and supporting comments to be included in project outputs.

This research was co-funded by the European Commission (EC) 7th Framework Programme DRIHM2US Project, Grant Number 313122. The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of the European Commission and the project team, in particular, the group at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Muenchen for their production of the report “Report on an Assessment of Options for Organizational Setup” and the team at Deltares for leading the work package including this consultation.

The DRIHM2US project is paired with the SCIHM project in the USA, funded by the NSF. As such, the authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of our partner organisations from this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HR Wallingford, Howbery Park, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, OX10 8BA, UK

    Quillon Harpham & Olalla Gimeno

  2. CIMA Research Foundation, Genoa, Italy

    Antonio Parodi

  3. CNR – Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies, Genoa, Italy

    Daniele D’Agostino

Authors
  1. Quillon Harpham
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  2. Olalla Gimeno
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  3. Antonio Parodi
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  4. Daniele D’Agostino
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Quillon Harpham.

Additional information

Responsible editor: H. A. Babaie

Highlights

• Exploration of the features of hydro-meteorological e-Science environments;

• Transatlantic comparison into stakeholder experiences;

• Assessment of show-stopping issues for hydro-meteorological e-Science environments;

• Consideration into potential structure of multi-domain research infrastructures.

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Harpham, Q., Gimeno, O., Parodi, A. et al. A stakeholder consultation into hydro-meteorological e-science environments. Earth Sci Inform 10, 219–234 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-017-0294-6

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