Impact Assessment of Climate Change by Using Cloud Computing

Abstract

Climate change could have a pronounced impact on natural and agricultural ecosystems. To assess the impact of climate change, projected climate data have been used as inputs to models. Because such studies are conducted occasionally, it would be useful to employ Cloud computing, which provides multiple instances of operating systems in a virtual environment to do processing on demand without building or maintaining physical computing resources. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to use open source geospatial applications in order to avoid the limitations of proprietary software when Cloud computing is used. As a pilot study, Amazon Web Service ? Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was used to calculate the number of days with rain in a given month. Daily sets of climate projection data, which were about 70 gigabytes in total, were processed using virtual machines with a customized database transaction application. The application was linked against open source libraries for the climate data and database access. In this approach, it took about 32 hours to process 17 billion rows of record in order to calculate the rain day on a global scale over the next 100 years using ten clients and one server instances. Here I demonstrate that Cloud computing could provide the high level of performance for impact assessment studies of climate change that require considerable amount of data.