Speaker
Description
Coastal and port managers need accurate and reliable predictions to decide when to restrict navigation or leisure activities, close a terminal or reinforce mooring arrangements, and to plan adaptation options against foreseen future conditions, e.g., sea-level rise. Predictions normally require modelling, software engineering and distributed computing skills working together. OPENHIDRA packages the whole predictive chain as a user-friendly web application.
OPENHIDRA is a climate-adaptation service for coastal and port areas, developed by LNEC within the HE project Climate-Adapt4EOSC (GA 101188248). It merges two complementary services already in operation: OPENCoastS, which assembles on-demand circulation and water quality forecasts for user-selected coastal and estuarine regions, and HIDRALERTA, which turns offshore wave predictions into risk assessment, early warning and planning products for wave overtopping and flooding, and port operations. The user supplies an unstructured grid, selects ocean and river flow forcings (if relevant), ship information and port configurations; the service automatically handles forcing acquisition, daily deployment, validation against in situ and satellite data, and result visualisation.
The present work focuses on the software and infrastructure behind the integrated service. Each independent service keeps its own web frontend, backend, PostGIS spatial database and NextCloud file store, deployed on cloud virtual machines at CNCA (Portugal) and IFCA (Spain). The OPENCoastS backend implements the full forecast lifecycle: a forcings module with data adapters for several providers (e.g. Copernicus Marine - CMEMS, ECMWF, Météo-France, IPMA); normalises grids, time steps, coordinate systems and variable naming into one internal representation; builds run directories for SCHISM and WaveWatchIII through its workflow engine; submits jobs to HPC, cloud or EOSC workers; monitors execution and post-processes outputs into NetCDF, ncWMS layers and time series, keeping provenance throughout. HIDRALERTA backend follows a similar structure, obtaining offshore conditions from different providers; automatically deploying daily forecasting cycles supported by a modelling chain consisting of: wave propagation and disturbance models, ship behaviour modelling, and tools to estimate wave overtopping, ship maneuvering and mooring; alert levels estimation through comparison against pre-defined thresholds; production of hazard maps and alerts; issuing of visual reports and relevant information to the stakeholders.
Integration follows a federated model approach: the two systems remain independently operable, exchange results through shared storage, and OPENCoastS´ water levels, velocities and wave boundary conditions can feed HIDRALERTA forecasts and scenarios. A unified portal with single sign-on through EGI Check-in service and a common output viewer sits on top. EOSC onboarding is under way: an EOSC Marketplace entry, EUDAT B2SAFE for long-term storage, batch execution on CNCA and IFCA clusters through the EGI DIRAC workload manager, alignment with the EOSC Execution Framework, an OpenAPI specification exposed through the project API gateway, and interoperability with the project climate-adaptation ontology and knowledge graph. We comply with what EOSC readiness demands of a domain service, including the data quality dimension that FAIR compliance does not cover: a fully FAIR forecast can still be a poor forecast.