Regional Earth Science Communities Supported by SEE-GRIDSCI

The South Eastern Europe (SEE) e-Infrastructure, developed by the previous and current SEE-GRID projects, is enabling new scientific collaborations thanks to the work of SEE-GRID-SCI (www.see-gridsci.eu). SEE-GRID-SCI aims to accelerate e-Infrastructure uptake by new user groups extending over the region, with an emphasis on three strategic earth science Virtual Organisations (VOs): seismology, meteorology and environmental protection. These VOs attract application developers, scientists, users, beneficiaries and many others.

Seismology VO
Scientists in the seismology field need computational resources for mathematical modeling of seismic phenomena, as well as storage resources for massive collections of seismic data from geographically distributed sensors. The Seismology VO aims to use the grid platform for its seismology data and applications, which include models for detecting earthquake locations, fault-planes or seismic risks. In this way, they aim to encourage more seismologists from the SEE countries to use grid resources. To realise this aim, the VO require distributed seismic data to be logically organised, indexed and updated, and programming tools that provide easy access to this data.

Meteorology VO
Weather prediction, which uses parallelisable numerical calculations that are CPU-intensive and demand significant disk storage space, is well suited to the grid infrastructure. The Meteorology VO uses an innovative approach to weather forecasting, using a number of limited-area weather models under various initial conditions with the aim of producing regional scale “ensemble” forecasts. These forecasts are based on the multitude of model outputs, and thus assess the prediction uncertainty. The VO also uses the grid infrastructure to perform very fine resolution simulations, aiming to reproduce and forecast airflow patterns over the complex terrain common to many SEE countries. 

Environmental VO
Environmental protection addresses practical problems related to security and quality of life, and is hence of great interest to SEE countries. The Environmental VO covers two main domains—environmental protection and response, and environment-oriented satellite image processing. These applications bring together scientists and research institutions from across the SEE region, forming collaborations that aim to leverage SEE-GRID resources to create applications of sufficient temporal and spatial resolution to be relevant on a regional level.
As outlined above, modern earth science research involves solving problems at orders of magnitude much larger than anything previously attempted. This involves not only huge amount of data, but also regional applications able to process that data, and software that enables regional and national collaborations. This in turn requires significant computing power, storage and connectivity. SEE-GRID-SCI makes this by providing the e-Infrastructure together with application-level services and operational tools, collaboration facilities, and also mechanisms for development, deployment and user support.