Earth Applications Group in the EGEE Europan Project : First experiments and objectives

The aim of the EGEE (Enabling Grids E-science in Europe) project, funded by the EC is to build on recent advances in Grid Technology and to develop a service grid infrastructure, built on the EU Research Network GEANT, available to scientific and industrial applications. The Earth Sciences group is concern in the deployment of selected applications on the EGEE production testbed. Today applications include Earth Observation, Climate, Hydrology, Solid Earth and applied Geophysics. Recent developments made in the domains of Earth Observation and Solid Earth geophysics will be presented. In Earth observation, the goal is to drive the satellite operational and research community to use the Grid to process, validate and exchange large sets of data. This objective has begun during the European DataGrid project. First results have been obtained for Ozone data processing and validation. Large numbers and large volume of files from different satellite instruments (Gome and Gomos) and ground measurements have be handled on the Grid. More than 70,000,000 of Ozone profiles have been produced and stored on the Grid by orbit. The data has been processed with complex algorithms (e.g. Neural approach, inversion methods) using IDL-runtime. Creation and secure access to metadata and satellite data has been made possible on the Grid. Moreover, ESA built a secure portal to access to its Archive Mass Storage to transfer satellite data on the Grid and to process the selected data. This Grid interface has provided a very progressive way for end-users to access and process satellite data. In EGEE an attempt to access other satellite archives from the Grid and process scientific jobs requiring access to several databases for quasi-real time prediction, like ozone, is in progress. In The Solid Earth, a first example of the use of the GRID has been done in the case of a seismic tomography study by IPG Paris. Secure and restricted access to database has been demonstrated as well as complex processing of seismic data (least-square inversion with parallel solver). The implementation on the GRID will be detailed. Ongoing extensions concern GPS data access and processing using the GAMMIT tool. This includes access to external data from the GRID. The goal is to provide a complete workflow of data storage, processing, analysis and visualisation with a secure portal built on the work done in Earth Observation. Another ongoing work concerns processing and sharing large data sets of synthetic seismograms produced by large 3D numerical simulations in complex Earth models. One of the key issues here is the data exchange format for synthetic seismograms. Progress in that direction is part of the objectives of the European SPICE project, and has to be done in closed collaboration with the FDSN/IRIS group. Grid technology allow not only the exchange of data but also the access in the same job to several distributed databases in the emerging large scale European projects like GMES and SPICE. The Earth Applications group involves today several institutes : IPSL, IPGP, ESA/ESRIN, CGG, CRS4, DKRZ, KNMI, SRON, UNINE, UTV