DRIHMS · Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology Study

In the Lisbon strategy, the 2005 European Council identified knowledge and innovation as the engines of sustainable growth and stated that it is essential to build a fully inclusive information society. In parallel, the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (Hyogo, 2005), defined among its thematic priorities the improvement of international cooperation in hydrometeorology research activities.Hydrometeorological science has made strong progress over the last decade at the European and worldwide level: new modelling tools, post processing methodologies and observational data are available.In principle, a huge amount of hydrometeorological data and information is available for the European region, but enormous scientific and technical obstacles have to be overcome when mining the data.Recent European efforts in developing a platform for e-science, like EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), SEE-GRID-SCI (South East Europe -GRID e-Infrastructure for regional e-Science), and the German C3-Grid, provide an ideal basis for the sharing of complex hydrometeorological data sets and tools. Despite these early initiatives, however, the awareness of the potential of the Grid technology as a catalyst for future hydrometeorological research is still low and both the adoption and the exploitation have astonishingly been slow, not only within individual EC member states, but also on a European scale.With this background in mind, the goal of the Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology Study (DRIHMS) project is the promotion of the Grid culture within the European hydrometeorological research community through the diffusion of a Grid platform for e-collaboration in this earth science sector: the idea is to further boost European research excellence and competitiveness in the fields of hydrometeorological research and Grid research by bridging the gaps between these two scientific communities.