Stephan Kindermann
DKRZ

Grid Infrastructures for Climate Data Handling

Modern coupled climate models are mostly running on dedicated, tightly
coupled HPC computers. They produce exponentially growing amounts of 
data. This model data is becoming important for a large, diverse group 
of people. A powerful data handling and processing infrastructure for 
climate scientists is needed to support them in finding, accessing,
comparing data as well as generating new derived data products e.g. for
climate impact studies. Also policy makers as well as the private 
sector have an increasing demand on infrastructural facilities to make 
model data products easily accessible.
Grid technology is one key component to build up such an infrastructure.
In this talk we present developments done in several national and 
international projects towards a distributed data handling and 
processing infrastructure. Experiences from the German C3Grid project 
and the prototype C3Grid/EGEE integration are summarized. Additionally 
recent developments towards a world wide climate model data 
infrastructure in the context of the international climate model
inter-comparison project (CMIP5) and the data handling effort for the
next intergovernmental panel of climate change (IPCC) assessment report 
are presented.