National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) continuously collects terabytes of data a day from satellites, radars, ships, weather models, and other sources. While this data is publicly available, it is often difficult to dissect. The Big Data Program (BDP) was created to bridge the knowledge gap and help provide easy access to global climate and environmental information to the public.
The BDP is a cloud platform that is supported by public-private partnerships. Adrienne Simonson, Director of Big Data Program at NOAA, commented that the “BDP leverages cloud provider’s infrastructure to achieve NOAA’s goals of reduced costs and risks for the agency, and improved user services and support of societal innovations. Our cloud partners accelerate access use in application of NOAA data through their platforms compute capabilities and tools, thus enabling data set integration across the federal government and beyond…There is clear and compelling synergy between NOAA’s mission, the cloud partners’ commitment, and users, including existing innovators for future entrepreneurs.”
There are several ways that the public can benefit from NOAA’s BDP. For example, industries are able to use the research to increase the speed at which new products and services are developed. “It allows for the creation of new economic activities and new research opportunities,” said Simonson. “It allows for new insights and new approaches to problems like wildfire detection, severe flooding, and other societal challenges. the BDP supports the use of NOAA data in climate research and collaboration across the world by encouraging innovative data analytics increasing computational capabilities for earth system science.” State and local governments are also able to use the climate data for future planning by determining climate resiliency for a certain location. The BDP aids these governments in providing a readily available solution that needs little training to make a significant impact on a community.
Another use case for the BDP is in the commercial industry. Retailers use the weather data for planning purposes. Monica McEwen, Deloitte Managing Director, commented that “retail planners use weather data to identify the quantity of things that they need to sell. If it’s going to be a really long winter, they’re going to manufacture more snow coats. If it’s going to be a shorter winter, they’re going to reduce the number of snow coats that they manufacture and reduce the time in which they sell them.”
As seen by the BDP, the open data movement among the federal government to partner with private industry makes data more usable. With the technological advancement of recent years, the platforms are able to be built and handle the volume of data so that it can be publicly available. The move to the cloud environment makes these instances a reality. It’s important to continue the partnership between public and private organizations to build usable and performative tools.
To learn more about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Big Data Program, click here.
