Flood Forecasting in a Grid Computing Environment

This paper presents a prototype of a flood forecasting system based on Grid computing. Flood forecasting is a complex problem that requires cooperation and coupling of many simulation models. To enable this coupling in an effective way, a part of the CrossGrid project is aimed towards developing a Grid Computing Environment (GCE) for flood forecasting, as described here. The Grid computing environment consists of a cascade of simulation models, a storage system for computed and measured data and other used datasets, a web-based portal with collaboration tools and a powerful computation facility. The whole system is tied together by Grid technology and is used to support a virtual organization of experts, developers and users.