Towards an interoperable and distributed e-infrastructure for hydro-meteorology: the DRIHM project

Predicting weather and climate and its impacts on the environment, including hazards such as floods and landslides, is one of the main challenges of the 21st century with significant societal and economic implications. To advance the state of the art in forecasting extreme events, an effective collaboration with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) scientific community is necessary to address challenges in combining meteorological, hydrological, hydraulic and impact observations and modelling tools seemingly and in a platform that allows scenario building and decision-support. With these issues in mind, the Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology (DRIHM) project aims at setting the stage for a new way of doing Hydro-Meteorological Research (HMR). The DRIHM goal is the development of an e-Science environment that allows users, from researchers to environmental agencies and also citizen scientists, to access and combine hydro-meteorological data and models using integrated specific services, user-friendly interfaces and proper computational infrastructures. This paper mainly focuses on the description of HMR requirements for the execution of complex HMR chains in an interoperable and distributed e-Infrastructure.