Brokering approach based implementation for the national hydrological and meteorological information system in Italy

The Italian national hydrological and meteorological information system is being operationally implemented by Regional Hydrological Services (SIR), under the coordination of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and the collaboration of National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research (CNR-IIA) for architectural design and implementation of the central components and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) as cloud computing service developer and infrastructure provider. This work is funded by the Italian Ministry of Ecological Transition under the national initiative “Piano Operativo Ambiente FSC 2014-2020” with the aim of providing a standardised and uniform access to hydro-meteorological data of Italy, allowing, among the others, calculating statistics, trends and indicators related to the hydrological cycle, weather and climate and water resources at national and sub-national (e.g., river basin districts, catchments, climatic areas) scales. A prototype of the system has been developed in the framework of the Italian National Board for Hydrological Operational Services, coordinated by ISPRA, which federates the Italian SIRs that are responsible for hydro-meteorological monitoring at local level. 

A hydrometeorological web portal will be the entry point for end users such as Institutional bodies, research institutions and universities to discover, access and download hydrological and meteorological data of Italy made available by the SIR services.  

Each SIR is already publishing online hydrological and meteorological regional data by means of Internet services. As a requirement, no obligation can be imposed on the specific communication protocols (and related data models) that will be implemented by such services, as the entry barrier for SIR to participate in the system of systems should be minimal.

CNR-IIA is responsible for the design of the architecture, which will be based on a brokering approach to enable interoperability amongst the heterogeneous systems. CNR-IIA is also responsible for the implementation of both the brokering component, based on the Discovery and Access Broker (DAB) technology and the hydrometeorological web portal.

The DAB is a software framework able to implement discovery and access functionalities across a distributed set of heterogeneous data publication systems, in a transparent way for the end user, by acting as a mediator of communication protocols and related data models.

Other service interfaces published by the brokering component will be used by different end-user tools and applications, enabling as well sharing of hydrological and meteorological data of Italy towards different national and international initiatives, in particular the WMO Hydrological Observing System (WHOS).

The brokering component will be deployed and managed operatively on a cloud infrastructure to optimize overall system performance and resource usage.

The system will be initially hosted on the CNR-IIA cloud infrastructure backed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), while the target hosting infrastructure and the related cloud computing services, to be ready for operative use by the end of 2025, will be provided by INFN.