NOAA to seek partnership to boost data sharing

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which collects weather and climate data to generate some 15 million weather products, wants to improve the data it releases to the private sector and taxpaying public.

NOAA CIO Joe Klimavicz, speaking at the Federal Cloud Computing Summit on Dec. 17 in Washington, D.C., said the agency is looking to release a request for information in January to solicit industry feedback for how the agency might turn data that it doesn’t currently release to the public into value-added products.

Ultimately, Klimavicz said, NOAA seeks to discover a “limited number of industry partners” to create a public-private partnership in which industry hosts “information out in the cloud, making it available in a format the government delivers.”

“We want to take information not readily available today and put it out there in a cloud solution at no cost to government and see if we can turn the data we’re not making available to value-added products,” Klimavicz said. “We really want to bring data itself together with advanced analytics so that you could ask tough questions without having to download every single bit out there.”

NOAA is one of the largest data-producing agencies in government, and when its next-generation weather satellites are launched in a few years, the agency will produce more data – and more kinds of data – than ever before.