Virtual Research Environment for Transdisciplinary Studies of Northern Eurasia

Growing amounts of environmental observation and modeling data facilitated the transformation of large data storage facilities into analysis centers. Huge funding is allocated by the leading agencies to provide these centers with analytic tools allowing users to process petabytes of relevant data sets without downloading those. Resulted distributed information-computational infrastructure is usually referred to as Virtual Research Environment (VRE). However, a climatic VRE should deal with all components of the climatic system as well as provide a transdisciplinary basic or applied study in this domain. This goal can't be achieved within a single data and analysis center.

To create the VRE required for NEFI studies we suggest to rely upon an experience gained during the development of the distribution research center (DRC) for the analysis of regional climatic and environmental changes. This DRC (http://www.sclimate.scert.ru/) includes two geographically distributed data storage and processing nodes supported by IMCES and UNH. The IMCES node performs meteorological data analysis, the UNH node deals with surface hydrology. This VRE will consist of a set of thematic distributed nodes reflecting key components of the climatic system. Operation of its nodes should be supported by thematically oriented research institutions. Currently, the geographic distribution of the software-hardware infrastructure supporting this VRE is under discussion with qualified institutes of RAS and SB RAS.

Development of such climatic VRE does not require the usage of huge data storage and supercomputer, and its cost looks quite moderate. It will provide scientists, professionals, and decision-makers with various distributed georeferenced resources and processing services, allowing identify the responses of Northern Eurasia environmental and socio-economical processes to climate change. It also assists professional education of graduate and postgraduate students and raises climatic competence of stakeholders, thus paving the way for development of adaptation strategy for Northern Eurasia.

Supported by projects AAAAA-A17-117013050037-0, AAAA-A17-117120670141-7 and RAS Program "Climate change: causes, risks, consequences, problems of adaptation and regulation".