On virtual observatories and modelled realities (or why discharge must be treated as a virtual variable)

摘要

Out there in the cloud, there is more computing power, and there are morendatabases, more images, more models and more model output than havenever existed before. There also are a variety of projects in differentncountries to provide ways of making all that information more readilynavailable at different scales and to different types of users, such as thenNatural Environment Research Council-funded pilot Virtual Observatorynproject in the UK, the Earth Cube initiative of the US National SciencenFoundation, and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. Therenalso are calls for hyper-resolution earth system science models at the globalnscale, analogous to virtual observatories, as a way ahead in predictingnglobal change (Wood et al., 2011).