A Web Based Workflow System for Distributed Atmospheric Data Processing

Distributed atmospheric data are often stored and managed in diverse regional and global repositories. The scientific process requires composition of these resources to solve a specific atmospheric science problem. A challenge is how to harvest data and models for designing and executing experiments in a seamless manner. Moreover, data-intensive scientific experiments with large-scale scientific data processing are iterative, dynamic and human centered. In particular, the atmospheric scientific experiments usually include some fixed steps, such as data discovery, access, preprocessing, transformation, visualization. A web service-enabled workflow system is a flexible tool for accessing distributed scientific data, and executing complex analysis on it. In this paper, we describe a four-layered architecture of the workflow system, which consists of web interaction layer, workflow engine layer, workflow components layer and resource layer. We also develop an intuitive and easy-to-use web based toolkit and apply it to atmospheric data processing.