Weather Data Processing in the Cloud Environment

The acceleration of cloud computing technology development in the past five years has already begun to reshape the weather enterprise, as it is known today.  Major cloud service providers have invited weather data providers and users from all sectors to join the enterprise by allowing access to observations, processing hardware, and data visualization and distribution tools.  Owners of legacy systems must evaluate if, when, and how to migrate some or all of their platforms and applications to the cloud.  Depending on their specific applications, costs, and security, developers of new systems may forego building standalone systems and go directly to the cloud environment.  However, cloud computing may not be a panacea for the processing needs of the entire weather enterprise given competing requirements and interests. This paper examines several decision vectors that determine suitability for applications and infrastructure components to be migrated into cloud computing solutions.