Europe develops new meteorology and environment information system
As weather, climate and water-related hazards account for nearly 90% of all natural disasters, meteorological systems are needed to provide the vital information for the advance warnings that save lives and reduce damage to the environment. The EU-funded SIMDAT project is developing a meteorological database or Virtual Global Information System Centre (VGISC), to provide the services to support the research and operational activities of the meteorological community in the domains of meteorology, hydrology and the environment. Based on grid technology, the software developed by the project partners will offer meteorological communities immediate, secure and convenient access to various data and analysis services as well as a user-friendly platform for the storage of meteorological data via the web. In this way, the VGISC hopes to enable the fast exchange of data for numerical weather forecasts, disaster management and international research without national frontiers and beyond boundaries. The partners in the project hope their software system will become the de facto standard and replace the multiplicity of systems used today. So far the project has built a prototype based on the national meteorological services of France, Germany and the UK and the results already look promising. According to the coordinator of the project, the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), the opportunities for the new VGISC technology are excellent as VGISC is not only of interest within Europe. Already the national meteorological services of Australia, China, Japan, Korea and the Russian Federation's National Oceanographic Centre have deployed the SIMDAT software and are collaborating actively with the European partners. The infrastructure of this new system will be based on a mesh network of peers and meteorological databases. Messages will be interchanged using algorithms based on mobile telephony technologies and metadata synchronisation on a journalised file system. The Grid technology will be is based on Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) which is founded on easily recognisable web service and web technology concepts. The standard protocols such as Open Archive Initiative (OAI) will be used to synchronize and integrate existing archives and databases as well as to extend interoperability. The SIMDAT project will be Europe's contribution to the infrastructure technology of the emerging information system of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The WMO is currently modernising its long-standing Global Telecommunications System (GTS), an international network for exchanging mainly meteorological data and warnings in real-time. One of the advantages of the new information system will be to provide access to all environmental communities around the world, whereas GTS only allows access for the present national weather services of EU Member States. Project partners say that the results obtained from SIMDAT are increasingly in demand from European and international meteorological services and are likely to become acknowledged worldwide.