The challenges of developing an open source, standards-based technology stack to deliver the latest UK climate projections
Ag Stephens, Philip James, David Alderson, Stephen Pascoe, Simon Abele, Alan M. Iwi, Peter Chiu · International Journal of Digital Earth · 2011
To improve the understanding of local and regional effects of climate change, the UK government supported the development of new climate projections. The Met Office Hadley Centre produced a sophisticated set of probabilistic projections for future climate. This paper discusses the design and implementation of an interactive website to deliver those projections to a broad user community. The interface presents complex data sets, generates on-the-fly products and schedules jobs to an offline weather generator capable of outputting gigabytes of data in response to a single request. A robust and scalable physical architecture was delivered through significant use of open source technologies and open standards.