Experiences with distributed computing for meteorological applications: grid computing and cloud computing

Abstract. Experiences with three practical meteorological applications with different characteristics are used to highlight the core computer science aspects and applicability of distributed computing to meteorology. Through presenting cloud and grid computing this paper shows use case scenarios fitting a wide range of meteorological applications from operational to research studies. The paper concludes that distributed computing complements and extends existing high performance computing concepts and allows for simple, powerful and cost-effective access to computing capacity.