Development of a Web-Based Information-Computational Infrastructure for the Siberia Integrated Regional Study

Abstract

To understand dynamics of regional environment properly and perform its assessment on the basis of monitoring and modelling, an information-computational infrastructure is required. Management of multidisciplinary environmental data coming from large regions requires new data management structures and approaches. In this chapter on the basis of an analysis of interrelations between complex (integrated) environment studies in large regions and modern information-computational technologies major general properties of distributed information-computational infrastructure required to support planned investigations of environmental changes in Siberia in the Siberia Integrated Regional Study (SIRS) are discussed. SIRS is a Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) mega-project co-ordinating national and international activity in the region in line with an Earth System Science Program (ESSP) approach. The infrastructure developed in cooperation of Russian Academy of Science (Siberian Branch) specialists with their European and American partners/counterparts is aimed at supporting multidisciplinary and “distributed” teams of specialists performing cooperative work with tools for exchange and sharing of data, models and knowledge optimizing the usage of information-computational resources, services and applications. Recently developed key elements of the SIRS infrastructure are described in details. Among those are the Climate site of the environmental web portal ATMOS (http://climate.atmos.iao.ru) providing an access to climatic and mesoscale meteorological models and the Climate site of the Enviro-RISKS web portal (http://climate.risks.scert.ru/), providing an access to interactive web-system for regional climate assessment on the base of standard meteorological data archives. As an example of the system usage recent dynamics of some regional climatic characteristics are analyzed.