Improving the discovery and re-use of hazard models – the PURE Portal

The Probability Uncertainty and Risk in the Environment (PURE) network is an action that has been prioritised by NERC in order to increase the impact of NERC Natural Hazards Research and to take a national leadership role in changing the way in which uncertainty and risk are assessed and quantified across the natural hazards community. Running in parallel with the PURE research programme a requirement was identified by the PURE project board to increase the level of sharing and re-use of hazard models. This provides an important knowledge exchange facility and help to ensure maximum exposure for NERC funded models. The PURE portal consists of a web interface underpinned by a model metadata database. Whilst there are many metadata catalogues and repositories for spatial data sets, e.g. data.gov.uk, the same is not the case for process models. Zaslavsky et al (2014) review five existing ones which mainly contain model codes, examples include the US-based CSDMS model catalogue (Peckham et al., 2014) and the TESS model funded by the EU which was created to store metadata for ecosystem management. In the UK, the FluidEarth 2 catalogue holds metadata on linkable models (Harpham et al., 2014). The PURE portal is specifically designed to hold metadata for both model code and model instance for Hazard models and their implementations created within the research community.