The Alpine Drought Observatory Platform: An alpine wide CI/CD Pipeline in Action

Today European scale research projects are not only limited to collaborative scientific advancements. They require joint cross-border, interdisciplinary development and operationalization of results following the principles of open source and FAIR data. The ADO Project (Alpine Drought Observatory, https://www.alpine-space.org/projects/ado/) is led by Eurac Research and relies on collaboration within research institutes of six alpine countries for creating a scientifically sound operational drought information web platform aiding decision makers on an alpine to regional level in managing water resources and drought impacts. Collaboratively creating and maintaining the ADO web platform (https://ado.eurac.edu/) that feeds on big data satellite and climate archives on the input side and shows curated drought information through an interactive web platform for stakeholders and decision makers calls for automated workflow management.
The workflow for the ADO project combines the components of data download from big open data satellite and meteorological archives, scientific computation of drought indicators for the alps, storage of the data and metadata in raster and vector databases, update of the interactive ADO web portal. Continuous Integration and Continuous Development (CI/CD) pipelines permit to chain processing tasks and integrate updates directly into the production environment. This concept is ideal for managing the operationalization of the ADO data production and visualization pipeline. It allows decentralizing the maintenance of the different components, starting the pipeline based upon events (availability of new data in the archives), triggering of chained computation tasks and automated updating of the interactive web portal.