Distributed environments for ocean forecasting: the role of cloud computing

Cloud computing offers an opportunity to innovate traditional methods for provisioning of scalable and measurable computed resources as needed by operational forecasting systems. It offers solutions for more flexible and adaptable computing architecture, for developing and running models, for managing and disseminating data to finally deploy services and applications. The review discussed on the key characteristic of cloud computing related on on-demand self-service, network access, resource pooling, elasticity and measured services. Additionally, it provides an overview of existing service models and deployments methods (e.g., private cloud, public cloud, community cloud, and hybrid cloud). A series of examples from the weather and ocean community is also briefly outlined, demonstrating how specific tasks can be mapped on specific cloud patterns and which methods are needed to be implemented depending on the specific adopted service model.