The IDIPOS project: is a multidisciplinary data infrastructure for weather and space weather feasible?

The Italian National Antarctic Programme (PNRA) has long supported scientific and technological activities addressed to the implementation, upgrade and maintenance of infrastructure and instruments supporting geosciences and physical sciences in the polar region. This report describes the first results of the Italian Database Infrastructure for Polar Observation Sciences (IDIPOS) project, which was recently approved by the PNRA. The project aims to study the feasibility of the hardware and software infrastructure for the construction of relational databases of acquisitions from past and current experiments in the polar areas. The study is based on the fundamental characteristics of the infrastructure: its implementation in Italy, with locations across the country, and its integration into the existing and future telematics infrastructure that will be available at the Italian bases. The project proposes a modern and high-tech infrastructure dedicated to data treatment, accessibility and archiving, in line with international standards. This infrastructure will allow modern, rapid and reliable treatment of the acquired data. The IDIPOS infrastructure is crucial during the planning phase of scientific and monitoring activities of the PNRA, especially of those included in the Scientific Committe for Antarctic Research (SCAR) projects, the International Polar Year, and the framework of international cooperation. In the first phase of the project, the observations are related to research projects in different PNRA sectors. The infrastructure will be potentially extendable to other observational activities. In this report, the infrastructure is introduced, while highlighting its usefulness for weather and space-weather forecasting for the scientific community and in the framework of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Research and Application for Polar Environment (GRAPE) in particular.