The NOAA Big Data Project

Abstract:

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a Big Data producer, generating tens of terabytes per day from hundreds of sensors on satellites, radars, aircraft, ships, and buoys, and from numerical models. These data are of critical importance and value for NOAA's mission to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts. In order to facilitate extracting additional value from this information, NOAA has established Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with five Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers — Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Open Cloud Consortium — to determine whether hosting NOAA data in publicly-accessible Clouds alongside on-demand computational capability stimulates the creation of new value-added products and services and lines of business based on the data, and if the revenue generated by these new applications can support the costs of data transmission and hosting. Each IaaS provider is the anchor of a "Data Alliance" which organizations or entrepreneurs can join to develop and test new business or research avenues. This presentation will report on progress and lessons learned during the first 6 months of the 3-year CRADAs.