The design and implementation of e-infrastructures for Hydro-Meteorological Research (HMR) and for Civil Protection applications require solving a number of problems that are concerned with multidisciplinary and interoperability issues. At the heart of this challenge lies the ability to have easy access to forecasting model and data components, assembling them according to recognized standards and facilitating collaboration between the Hydro-Meteorological (HM) and ICT communities. This is of particular importance because ICT methodologies and tools are often aimed at satisfying general needs resulting in a gap between specific HM modeling chain requirements and available tools. The goal is to relieve HM scientists from the burden of time-consuming activities as to install and optimize legacy forecast models that have been developed by such heterogeneous scientific community, to access and prepare the necessary data to run the models, to select the executable resources and monitor the simulation and to retrieve results, allowing them to focus mainly on how to improve the forecasts.

The aim of this special session is to bring together HM and ICT researchers – and in perspective the Climate modeling community - in order to present and discuss solutions for this applicative scenario.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- data access, management and exchange among heterogeneous HMR models
- data base solutions for store, access and retrieve HMR data
- set up, management and validation of complex HMR workflows on distributed infrastructures
- HPC, Grid and Cloud experience in HMR
- set up and management of e-Infrastructures for HMR
- science gateway for HMR
- advanced and user friendly interfaces to manage HMR forecasting simulations
- advanced remote visualization solutions for HMR simulation results
- simple services for citizen scientists interested in HM