A Web Portal for Regional Projection of Weather Forecast Using GRID Middleware.

Weather forecast is a complex multi-disciplinary problem which requires a cascade of different scientific tools, from differential equation solvers to high-dimensional statistical and data-mining algorithms. The demand for high-resolution predictions is continuously increasing due to the multiple applications in hydrology, agronomy, etc., which require regional meteorological inputs. To fill the gap between the coarse-resolution lattices used by global weather models and the regional needs of applications, a number of statistical downscaling techniques have been proposed. In this paper we describe a Web portal which integrates the necessary tools with Grid middleware allowing for distributed data access and computing. The portal is part of the ENSEMBLES EU-funded project and allows end users to interactively downscale weather predictions using a web browser. Both the architecture and the usage of the portal are described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]