NOAA Inter-Agency Networking for Open Data and Research Results

Abstract:

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) generates tens of terabytes of data per day from hundreds of sensors on satellites, radars, aircraft, ships, and buoys, and from numerical models. With rare exceptions, all of these data should be made publicly accessible in a usable fashion. NOAA has long been both an advocate and a practitioner of open data, and has observations going back 150 years in its archives. The NOAA data management community therefore welcomed the White House mandates on Open Data and Open Research, and has striven to improve standardization internally and in collaboration with other organizations. This paper will summarize the state of inter-agency networking by NOAA, and will discuss future perspectives, in particular the need to achieve a state where the appropriate technology choices for particular classes of geospatial data are obvious and beyond discussion, and where data sharing and metadata creation are built into agency workflows for project planning, approval, and execution, so that instead of writing and enforcing mandates we can focus on actually using data from multiple sources to improve understanding and decision-making.