Scientific progress in the Earth Sciences is heavily based on the ability to share, analyze and archive extreme amounts of data, which are often collected dynamically from widely distributed sources, as well as complex and computationally demanding models/post-processing tools. Sharing, analyzing and archiving this data and model output is a very important but also challenging task facing the Earth Science community. Providing an integrated computing and data e-Infrastructure able to support application requirements in a scalable, extensible and interoperable fashion is the primary need and challenge.

The dramatic example of the synoptic-scale meteorological system (see figure), which raged from West Virginia to Maine from last October 29th until late October 30th (2011) and was blamed for at least 13 deaths, then it moved across the Ocean Atlantic and was responsible on November 4th for Genoa city (Liguria, North-Western Italy) being gutted by flash floods that erupted when 550 millimetres of rain -- a third of the average annual rainfall -- came down in 5 hours (6 dead people), is calling for a more comprehensive cooperation between EU and USA in the study of severe hydro-meteorological events and climate changes effects.

Thus the key objectives of the DRIHM2US project are:

• Analyzing requirements of the HMR community towards common e-Infrastructures within the EU and US;
• Investigating common ICT infrastructure approaches to in order to lower access barriers;
• Inviting selected experts from both the HMR and ICT communities to perform hands-on plug-tests between current EU and US e-Infrastructures and HMR applications in dedicated workshops;
• Summarizing the results of these workshops and providing an outlook into the future based on the respective findings.