Towards a flexible assessment of climate impacts: The example of agile workflows for the ci:grasp platform

Abstract

The Climate Impacts: Global and Regional Adaptation Support Platform (ci:grasp) is a web-based climate information service for exploring climate change related information in its geographical context. We have used the jABC workflow modeling and execution framework to make flexibilized versions of the processes implemented in ci:grasp available to the scientific community. The jABC permits us to leverage the processes to an easily accessible conceptual level, which enables users to flexibly define and adapt workflows according to their specific needs. The workflows are suitable as graphical documentation of the processes and are directly repeatable and reusable, which facilitates reproducibility of results and eventually increases the productivity of researchers working on climate impact risk assessment. In this paper, we use variations of workflows for the assessment of the impacts of sea-level rise to demonstrate the flexibility we gained by following this approach.