BRIDGE is a two year project funded by the EC under the FP6-IST programme and is aimed at demonstrating the benefits of GRID technology for international cooperation, in particular between Europe and China.

The BRIDGE project provides an opportunity to address the next phase of the THORPEX Grand Global ensemble (TIGGE) development, which is to provide access to the output of ensemble prediction from several NWP centres worldwide, to research users throughout the world.

The Meteorological application within BRIDGE will consist in providing GRID services that interface to the databases at ECMWF and Chinese Meteorological Administration (CMA), allowing to build probabilistic products in a distributed fashion. The main challenges will come from the sheer volumes of data involved: methods will have to be found to allow an efficient usage of these data while minimising transfers.