WISENT: e-Science for Energy Meteorology

Our energy production increasingly depends on renewable energy sources, which impose new challenges for distributed and decentralized systems. One problem is that the availability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar is not continuous as it is affected by meteorological factors. The challenge is to develop forecast methods capable of determining the level of power generation in near real-time in order to control power plants for optimal energy production. Another scenario is the identification of optimal locations for such power plants. In our collaborative project, these tasks are investigated in the domain of energy meteorology. For that purpose large data sources from many different sensors (e.g., satellites and ground stations) are the base for complex computations. The idea is to parallelize these computations in order to obtain significant speedup. This paper reports on an ongoing project employing Grid technologies in that context. Our approach to processing large data sets from a variety of heterogeneous data sources as well as ideas for parallel and distributed computing in energy meteorology are presented. Preliminary experience with several Grid middleware systems in our application scenario is discussed.