The DRIHM e-science infrastructure supporting citizen-scientists involvement

Over the last two decades, a solid consensus grew in the scientific community that the so-called Citizen Science could contribute to advancing our current knowledge in many disciplines. In particular Hydro-Meteorological (HM) researchers immediately pointed out to the countless advantages of cooperating with Citizen Scientists. In this paper we present the experience made during the Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro- Meteorology (DRIHM) project for supporting citizen scientists involvement. The paper describes the different roles participants can assume, based on their capabilities in using and extending the DRIHM virtual collaborative platform and specifically giving a case for identifying and integrating citizen scientists. The major achievement is represented by the possibility for citizen scientists to execute actual simulations using real forecasting models and computational platforms. This can represent a first step for the dissemination of the right culture of the HM risk among the population and to enforce the involvement of citizen scientists in HM data processing and analysis tasks.