This study considers long-term precipitation and temperature variability across the Caribbean using two gridded data sets (CRU TS 3.21 and GPCCv5). We look at trends across four different regions (Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western), for three different seasons (May to July, August to October and November to April) and for three different periods (1901–2012, 1951–2012 and 1979–2012). There are no century-long trends in precipitation in either data set, although all regions (with the exception of the Northern Caribbean) show decade-long periods of wetter or drier conditions. The most significant of these is for the Southern Caribbean region which was wetter than the 1961–1990 average from 1940 to 1956 and then drier from 1957 to 1965. Temperature in contrast shows statistically significant warming everywhere for the periods 1901–2012, 1951–2012 and for over half the area during 1979–2012. Data availability is a limiting issue over much of the region and we also discuss the reliability of the series we use in the context of what is known to be available in the CRU TS 3.21 data set. More station data have been collected but have either not been fully digitized yet or not made freely available both within and beyond the region

In many Grid infrastructures different kinds of information services are in use, which utilize different incompatible data structures and interfaces to encode and provide their data. Homo-

Abstract.Experiences with the management of Grid specific monitoring and accounting data have shown that current approaches do not sufficiently support a distinction between providers, users and customers of a Grid. This gap can be filled by the use of Customer Service Management techniques which enable customers to individually monitor and control their subscribed services. We adapt a Customer Service Management scenario to Grid environments and outline an architecture dedicated to the management and visualization of monitoring and accounting data. To proof the concept, a prototype based on standard Grid components which manages user's needs and interactions with the resource provider is presented.

Grid operations rely on monitoring services fed by a multitude of sources. These services provide relevant information about the status of the resources and the quality of the services in the infrastructure. In a Grid, they must disseminate this information across multiple administrative domains and heterogeneous technical platforms to users organized in different virtual organizations. In order to achieve this, data must be translated and homogenized dynamically. It must furthermore be tailored and processed in a controllable way, based on its allocation to virtual organizations. To resolve these requirements for the application of Grid resource monitoring, we propose functional modules, which conduct automated data migration and classification based on dynamic virtualization policies and define the composition of monitoring data related to virtual organizations. The resulting system enables an interoperable provisioning of specific monitoring data about the status of distributed Grid resources and services to dynamically changing virtual organizations.

After Computational Grids have lain the foundations for the functionalities and acceptance of Grid infrastructures, Service Grids may now set a new paradigm in their development and construction. We present an organizational model using different roles for each service layer, and discuss the possibility to integrate customer-oriented service chains, located in exclusively delegated virtual service domains, and delivered by multiple providers. This short paper briefly introduces an approach to realizing dynamic customer-oriented resource monitoring for Grids, and describes an ongoing effort to compose virtual monitoring instruments for individual Grid users.