Some Aspects of Development of Virtual Research Environment for Analysis of Climate Change Consequences
We present general structure, elaborated approach and preliminary results of a project aimed at analyzing climate data and predicting impacts of climate change on the environment. One of the project objectives is provision of specialists working in climate related sciences and decision-makers with accurate and detailed climatic characteristics for the selected area and reliable and affordable tools for their in-depth statistical analysis and studies the effects of climate change. Its ultimate goal is the development of hardware and software prototype of a virtual research environment (VRE) for the climate and environmental monitoring and analysis of the impact of climate change on socio-economic processes of local and regional scale. This environment will integrate the known and new sets of climate data, software implementations of classic and new methods of statistical analysis of large data sets. It will provide the opportunity to scientists and decision-makers to use different geographically distributed spatially referenced data, processing resources and services through a web browser by integrating distributed systems that store, process and provide information via Geoportal. The first project results, namely the scheme of large sets of geospatial climate data storage together with supporting metadata database architecture and designed an intuitive graphical user interface, are presented. Also an approach to solution of the reduction problem in quantitative climatology is discussed.