A grid based infrastructure for environmental applications

Environmental monitoring data should be transformed, by scientific analysis, into assessments of current ecosystem condition and in evolution trends in time and space. The local, regional and global scales scientific data analysis, involves information mining from several data sources, i.e. multispectral satellite remote sensing data, urban environmental monitoring stations and oceanic or coastal buoys. The huge data amount to process, the complexity of the environmental models adopted and the necessary distributed collaboration between scientists and government agencies, require specific cyberinfrastructures. In this paper we present a Web Grid Portal prototype for environmental data processing, that aspires to provide distributed powerful computational resources able to process and to manage immense data set by a friendly graphical interface. Portal users can access to environmental data collected by different sources, process data using distributed computing resources and web applications or upload specific data processing applications.