Thematic virtual research environment for analysis, evaluation and prediction of global climate change impacts on the regional environment

Presented is a recently started Russian Science Foundation project "Virtual computational information environment for analysis, evaluation and prediction of the impacts of global climate change on the environment and climate of a selected region" aimed at development of accessible in Internet a computation and information environment providing unskilled in numerical modeling and software design specialists, decision-makers and stakeholders with reliable and easily used tools for in-depth statistical analysis of climatic characteristics, and instruments for detailed analysis, assessment and prediction of impacts of global climate change on the environment and climate of the targeted region. Two actively discussed nowadays problems are addressed by the project. The first one is a development of an environment in which scientists from different disciplines, stakeholders and decision makers, regardless of their geographical position, can freely access various data resources and processing services through a Web browser. Since progress in development of so called virtual research environment is based on information-computational technologies it will be discussed in this paper in more details. The second problem belongs to basic and applied climatology and will be discussed here rather briefly. It is a provision of interested parties with detailed climatic and ecological characteristics of targeted region and tools allowing get scientifically solid data necessary for the study of regional economic, political and social consequences of global climate change.