NOAA Observing Requirements Documentation, Verification and Validation Process

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) mission is to understand and predict changes in the earth's environment and conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet the Nation's socio-economic and environmental needs. At the core of this mission is the critical need for environmental observations and monitoring. In support of this need and to make strategic investment choices, NOAA must first identify all of its users observing requirements. To this end, the NOAA's Technology, Planning and Integration Office (TPIO) developed a process to collect, document, verify and validate observing requirements. NOAA has four Mission Goal areas and a Mission Support Goal, each with several subordinate Programs. Since 2005, TPIO has worked with these NOAA Goals and Programs and documented their observing requirements in a database called the Consolidated Observation Requirement List (CORL). TPIO also developed a process to verify and validate these observing requirements and make them available to NOAA users in the form of a document called the Program Observation Requirement Document (PORD). This paper discusses the TPIO process in collecting, documenting, verifying and validating NOAA's observing requirements.