In the Lisbon strategy, the 2005 European Council identified knowledge and innovation as the engines of sustainable growth and stated that it is essential to build a fully inclusive information society. In parallel, the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, defined among its thematic priorities the improvement of international cooperation in hydrometeorology research activities. This was recently confirmed at the Joint Press Conference of the Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Secretariat, held on January 2009, where it was noted that that flood and storm events are among the natural disasters that most impact human life.

 

Hydrometeorological science has made strong progress over the last decade at the European and worldwide level: new modelling tools, post processing methodologies and observational data are available.

 

Recent European efforts in developing a platform for e-science, like EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), SEEGRID-SCI (South East Europe GRID e-Infrastructure for regional e-Science), and the German C3-Grid, provide an ideal basis for the sharing of complex hydrometeorological data sets and tools. Despite these early initiatives, however, the awareness of the potential of the Grid technology as a catalyst for future hydrometeorological research (HMR) is still low and both the adoption and the exploitation have astonishingly been slow, not only within individual EC member states, but also on a European scale.