Web-service framework for environmental models

Environmental scientists always use different models to simulate the real world with their own devices. Because of the limited computing power, the simulation can consume very long time. Also, it is hard to share their models with others and they may need to rebuild the same model for similar problems. To solve these problems, we propose a web-service centric framework to expose models as services in this paper. The framework allows model execution in the cloud environment, submission of model data through the NetCDF standard data format and storage and access to the model resources through web services. The framework allows an easy way to publish models as Linux container images through an image hub. A prototype is introduced and implemented to prove the idea works.