Saharan Mineral Dust Experiment

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain) provides the SAMUM Research Group with dust forecast products generated from DREAM (Dust Regional Atmospheric Model). We particularly thank Dr. Carlos Pérez García-Pando of the Earth Sciences Division for his work in that cooperation.

Associated research groups:

Prof. Dr. Mohammed Diouri,
Université Mohammed Ier,
Laboratoire de Physique de l`Atmosphère,
Departement de Physique,
Faculté des Sciences,
Oujda, Morocco.

Experiment DARPO
Geophysics Centre of Évora
Évora, Portugal

Table 1

The SAMUM consortium consists of the seven research groups listed in Table 1, four of which are university groups while three of them reside in research institutes. They operate from five different areas in Germany. Complementarities and mutual dependence are essential features of a DFG Research Group, which are detailed in the individual project proposals. For an overview these connections have been added to Table 1 in terms of input to the individual projects from the group and output from each of the projects to the rest of the group.

In the present case of a non-local DFG Research Group connectivity becomes an important issue for the functioning of SAMUM. Consequently, a dedicated unique tool will be utilized for this purpose. The Internet has become an important tool of scientific information exchange. Scientific papers, project reports, etc. are usually offered on university and research institute Web servers. Scientific software, too, is exchanged over the Internet. However, accessing software is not as easy as accessing scientific documents. For most of the scientific software no tools for the Internet exist. Users must learn how to install downloaded software and make them run on their specific platform. Very often this becomes a tedious task.

To start to overcome this lack DLR has developed a generic software infrastructure called “Virtual Laboratory” (VL), which makes broad scientific applications available for online execution via the Internet along with tightly integrated, searchable, coarsely standardized documentation under minimal effort on the users site. The actual platform is designed for non-interactive or pseudo-interactive command-line applications. This class of programs represents an essential part of scientific software. DLR has developed a trial system running successfully since one year. It provides Web access to light scattering and radiative transfer applications developed at DLR’s Remote Sensing Technology Institute (http://vl.nz.dlr.de). Establishing the VL is not a self-contained project within SAMUM but an essential networking tool for the different projects. Therefore it is located in the overhead structure of this proposal.

Most groups within SAMUM need access to sophisticated programs allowing light scattering analysis on non-spherical and/or inhomogeneous aerosol particles. With the VL infrastructure a consistent software basis for light scattering analysis will be established which allows a project-wide networking. Four software components addressing different types of particles and size distributions will be provided via DLR’s Virtual Laboratory Web tool to all SAMUM projects. All these programs already exist but have to be matched to the specific needs of SAMUM. Administration of the VL and user support is provided by the Remote Sensing Technology Institute of DLR.

Providing and utilizing the VL for SAMUM entails the adaptation of the VL software infrastructure to the special project needs, the integration of the software into the specific project environment, and the maintenance of the project-specific hard and software system.