Environmental modelling in the computing cloud

I am a Co-I on the NERC Environmental Virtual Observatory (Pilot) project. This project is investigating how linking data, models and expert knowledge will provide cost effective answers to vital wide-ranging environmental issues. Current this project is focused on the soil – water system. This is a £1.6m project and runs until 2012.  I am involved in two work package: WP3 is research how to make environmental models avaialbe as web services and WP5 is looking at what novel questiosn we can answer when we consider hdyrological and biogeophyscial models with detailed national datasets.
From the EVO-p website

The project will exploit cloud computing to develop new applications for accessing, filtering and synthesising data to develop new knowledge and evaluation tools. It will investigate possible structures for the cloud environment and develop exemplars at a local and national scale of how the Environmental Virtual Observatory (EVO) could make environmental monitoring and decision making more efficient, effective and transparent to the whole community. Novel visualisation tools will promote cross-disciplinary communication and illustrate the effects of alternative strategies and solutions from ‘townhall to Whitehall’. The vision of the Environmental Virtual Observatory is to:

• Make environmental data more visible and accessible to a wide range of potential users and free to use for public good applications;
• Provide tools to facilitate the integrated analysis of data, greater access to added knowledge and expert analysis, and visualisation of the results;
• Develop new, added-value knowledge from public and private sector data assets to help tackle environmental challenges.