Cloud application for water resources modeling

Cloud computing is one of the most promising solutions for present and future water related problems. Planning and management of both urban water systems and basin-scale water resources systems are increasingly becoming multidisciplinary collaborative tasks that will rely on development of internet based systems based on web services that combine water related data, weather forecasts, climate variations, urbanization, population and economic growth, etc. These heterogeneous data sources (frequently provided by different institutions) may be integrated ‘on demand’ for water management tasks via cloud computing applications as the one demonstrated here. Cloud computing advantages over previous technologies are in the scalable computation power, internet based collaboration platform, transparency in the decision making processes and dissemination of valuable information between stakeholders and general public. The architecture of prototype cloud application for water resources modeling is based on the latest advancement in computer science and technology: Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architecture and web Geographic Information Systems. The prototype cloud application integrate three web services: (1) web service for managing of geospatial data (2) web service for support of water resources modeling. The components and software packages used in the development of the system are open source. The overall architecture and system components are flexible for adding new or upgrading existing web services. The system is scalable, interoperable and can work in distributed computer environment