Constraint-based web interface for hydro-meteorological model chaining

We aim to provide users with an intuitive system for configuring hydro-meteorological simulations, possibly running on heterogeneous hardware. Configuring such hydro-meteorological model chains, which exploits several numerical simulation models, is a complex activity. Each model has to nicely fit in the chain, providing interfaces coherent with the other models. Metadata may be adopted for formal chain definition and integrated model compositions, supporting cross-model consistency checks. This is helpful in order to avoid execution of misconfigured experiments, but metadata by itself cannot actively support the user during the configuration phase. In this talk we present a flexible Web interface, named Json-GUI, that is able to actively support the user in configuring consistent complex hydro-meteorological model chains by integrating and exchanging metadata description of model chain and model configurations, and producing correct model name lists, ready for model execution. Json-GUI has a modular design, able to support diverse use cases and can be customized with user-defined scripts to produce name lists, metadata and cross-model checks fitting the user needs. The use of Json-GUI to customize a model chain including a WRF instance will be discussed to show the benefits of this approach.