Across NOAA and other government agencies, there exists a wide variety of environmental data and information systems meeting various agency missions. To meet NOAA's mission — to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources — NOAA's data and systems need to be easily accessible and interoperable. Achieving this would lead to a more efficient organization. A concept conceived at Global Systems Division (GSD) called the NOAA Environmental Information Service (NEIS) can provide this functionality. While the concept is visionary, the core requirements of this new system are:
- Provide access to all information and data for all time scales
- Provide the information when the user needs it
- Provide the information in a form the user can interpret
- Make information available on all platforms
A GSD team was formed to explore how GSD is poised to make a significant contribution to a new kind of information services for environmental data. This project was coordinated to continue past efforts and evaluate needs, investigate previous work both internal and external to NOAA, assess relevant GSD capabilities, and decide how to best invest resources moving forward to build an infrastructure to obtain this goal.
This discussion will provide an overview of the team's findings, the NEIS concept, a demonstration of the NEIS/TerraViz prototype, as well as information regarding ongoing and future activities related to this project.
