Agile Workflows for Climate Impact Risk Assessment based on the ci:grasp Platform and the jABC Modeling Framework

Analyzing and assessing potential impacts of climate change are critical and challenging tasks that require the processing of large and heterogeneous datasets. These analyses are particularly demanding because of the multi-scale and multi-objective nature of environmental modeling for climate change impact assessment. The Climate Impacts: Global and Regional Adaptation Support Platform (ci:grasp) is a web-based climate information service for exploring climate change related information in its geographical context. In this paper, we show how the agile workflow development style supported by the jABC process modeling and execution framework permits us to leverage the processes implemented in the ci:grasp platform to a user-accessible level, and thus to enable users to easily define and perform multi-objective workflows tailored to their specific needs. Concretely, we discuss how we decomposed the ci:grasp’s original assessment of the impact of sea level rise into basic computational services, which we then used as workflow building blocks. Together with additional functionality from the jABC, we built a flexible library of directly executable workflows for this type of analysis that is especially suitable to increase the productivity of researchers working on the analysis processes.