Distributed modeling environment for global climate change research

Global climate change research requires cross-disciplinary cooperation. So there is an increasing call to the open modeling environment, as sharing and coupling of distinct domain models in a flexible, computationally efficient manner is the base of climate change research. But many existing models are deployed on geographic distributed servers and developed by different researchers with various languages, which require modelers familiar with models' details if want to use these models in their application. Therefore this problem commonly become a big barrier of model's sharing and assembles. In this paper, we present a system called DME (Distributed Modeling Environment) that provides an integrated modeling environment in completely open manner that enables researchers to share and integrate distributed models conveniently. To achieve that, a web service based approach is used and some features are implemented, which include: (1) web service standard based model encapsulation; (2) multiple distributed model coupling mode; (3) ontology based model management system. The system allows researchers to construct complex environmental models and applications quickly by integrating existing models service. At the end of this paper, an ongoing work is described as examples of its applications.