e-Environment: a Grid based integrated environment model of the North West
Project Overview
One of the most exciting benefits of the possibilities provided by the GRID in environmental modelling is the potential to implement models available from different institutions as a process of learning about specific places within an uncertainty estimation framework. Sites of interest can be implemented as active objects, seeking the information across the GRID to achieve a specified purpose and using the power of parallel computing resources to estimate the uncertainty associated with the predictions as constrained by site-specific observations, including those accessed over the GRID in real time. The recent river flooding in the UK has demonstrated the need for a new generation of systems for environmental forecasting. The subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) coupling between atmospheric forcing, catchment response, river runoff and coastal interaction with tidally dominated sea level requires the dynamical coupling of many processes and components to capture these subtleties. Components would be a representation of the coastal seas, the regional atmosphere and the terrestrial surface and subsurface hydrology that would interact through different boundary conditions. Built on the fluxes within those models air and water pollutant transport models and geochemical models could be implemented locally within the regional scale domain. Each component would be able to assimilate data transmitted from field sites and assess the uncertainty in the predictions. The components would share 4-D/5-D visualisation tools with appropriate interactive user interfaces. Users will be able to access the current data, visualise predictions for particular locations and play what-if scenario games over different time scales, including tools geared towards implementation of the EU Water framework and other legislation.
Objectives
This is a new approach to multi-scale environmental modelling. It requires bringing together existing databases, existing models within the spatial object oriented structure outlined in the previous section, developing and making use of GRID middleware tools. It is proposed to do this initially within the framework of three demonstrator projects as follows:
- Fluvial and tidal flooding using linked atmospheric (UMIST/JWMM), ocean (POL/Daresbury) and hydrological modelling (Lancaster) with use of on-line data (Environment Agency)
- Modelling the effects of pollutant transport and remediation of a chosen contaminated site on the basis of hydrological and biogeochemical modelling (Lancaster/Environment Agency/)
- Modelling the human impacts on phytoplankton populations in rivers and estuaries (CEH/POL/Lancaster/Environment Agency)
Latest progress on this project April 2007: Report
Publications
D. Hughes, P. Greenwood, G. Coulson, G. Blair, F. Pappenberger, P. Smith, K. Beven. GridStix: Supporting Flood Prediction using Embedded Hardware and Next Generation Grid Middleware, 4th IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Distributed Computing (MDC 2006), co-located with WoWMoM, 2006
D. Hughes, P. Greenwood, G. Blair, G. Coulson, F. Pappenberger, P. Smith and K. Beven. An Intelligent and Adaptable Grid-based Flood Monitoring and Warning System, Proceedings of the All Hands Meeting (2006).
P. Greenwood, D. Hughes, B. Porter, P. Grace, G. Coulson, G. Blair, F. Taiani, F. Pappenberger, P. Smith, K. Beven, Using Grid Technologies to Optimise a Wireless Sensor Network for Flood Management, Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 389–390, Boulder, Colorado, USA. November 2006.
P. Smith, K. Beven, W. Tych, D. Hughes, G. Blair, The Provision of Site Specific Flood Warnings Using Wireless Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the European Conference on Flood Risk Management (FloodRisk’08), Oxford, UK, September 2008.