Background The global changes that are currently threatening the natural environment demand appropriate answers and solutions by the environmental science community. The increasing amount of heterogeneous data—Big Data—needed for that endeavor typically requires large computational and storage resources. This manuscript presents a general conceptual model for easily porting environmental applications on different parallel and distributed infrastructures. Results We developed the conceptual model for a general environmental application and illustrate it through a use case on hydrological modeling. We also positioned this concept in a general methodology that will be used for efficiently porting applications on different computing environments. Conclusion The proposed conceptual model of an environmental application facilitates and simplifies not only the understanding of the structure of the application but also the general execution flow and the data flow. It provides a platform-independent, flexible and convenient way to execute the described application in a heterogeneous computing environment.