The DRIHM project aims at setting the stage for a new way of doing hydrometeorological research at European and possibly global scale. To shape this vision, DRIHM will establish a powerful, new collaboration framework between scientists across these HMR disciplines that cover weather/climate prediction to hydrologic prediction to on-the ground decision support tools. The actual objective is enable HMR to make a step beyond the state of the art in the modelling of forecasting chain.

The DRIHM e-Science environment is expected to drive the HMR towards new solutions and improved approaches for daily work, through:

• Supporting the development and deployment of an e-Science environment to be used by virtual research communities interested into HMR and related Earth Science disciplines;
• Promoting the establishment and diffusion of a service-orientated culture aimed at a user population broader than just specialist scientist users, also including members of public services (e.g. operational hydro-meteorological centres) and interested members of the general public.

To shape this vision, the key objectives of the DRIHM e-Science environment are:

• The provisioning of integrated HMR services (such as meteorological models, hydrological models, stochastic downscaling tools, decision support systems, observational data) enabled by unified access to and seamless integration of underlying e-Infrastructures (networking, computing and data infrastructures and services);
• The design, development and deployment of user-friendly interfaces aiming to abstract HMR service provision from the underlying e-Infrastructure complexities and specific implementations, thus enabling multidisciplinary and global collaboration between meteorologists, hydrologists and possibly other Earth scientists;
• The support of an HMR e-Science environment enabling the user-driven “composition” of virtual facilities in the form of hydro-meteorological forecasting chains, composed by different HMR resources (models, post-processing tools, decision support system models and data);
• The establishment of HMR e-Science support centres and corresponding training activities to attract a broad end-user audience comprising of scientists and non specialists including relevant European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) communities.

The DRIHM project will enhance the modelling and data processing capabilities of the HMR community through the adaptation, optimization, and integration of dedicated HMR services over the future European e-Infrastructure. A rigorous pan-European framework towards improving the prediction of extremes will be a legacy of DRIHM and is anticipated to contribute to its evolution and long-term sustainability. Different computing and data archiving paradigms will be utilized (Grid and HPC). By integrating HMR resources DRIHM will allow specialists to enter the e-Science environments more easily and at the same time stimulate use by non-specialists. The DRIHM virtual community is then composed of different group of users HMR researcher, public organizations and “citizen scientists” interested in HMR and related Earth science disciplines. The figure depicts a possible view of this scenario.