Mashing-Up Weather Networks Data to Support Hydro-Meteorological Research

It Solutions To Hmr Needs

In 2010, as a major activity of the DRHIMS project (http://www.drihms.eu), a series of web polls in the HMR and ICT communities were conducted aimed at better understanding the existing gap between HMR requirements and ICT offer. The HMR polls registered a total amount of 182 answers and the ICT near 100. Amongst the main observations, the analysis of the questionnaires¹ revealed data-related issues such as: interoperability (models, formats, metadata, etc.); availability; extensiveness (amount and size of data). This is well testified, for example by the answers to one of the “hot topic” HMR questions: “Rank (in a 5 point scale) the importance to have easy access to data in formats that are easy to handle”. The average result (4.28) testifies the degree of awareness between HM researchers, about the need of tools to tackle data access issues. Moreover, the analysis also pointed out the lack of commonly accepted tools for interchanging and merging scientific data from different sources and of common libraries for processing and visualizing scientific data and metadata. From this survey clearly emerged the urgency to develop IT initiatives and tools enabling rapid data discovery from different sources, from satellites to Personal Weather Stations (PWS), their collection and the development of functionalities to homogenize, compare and visualize these datasets.