Modernization of NCEI Legacy Software Suites for Improved Functionality and Cloud Readiness

Climate change is impacting every sector of the economy and is threatening the prosperity of the United States. Industries are working to adapt and build resilience, from how they source and move their goods to how they plan their infrastructure investments and operations and support climate vulnerable communities across the country. NOAA plays a crucial role in rapidly connecting industry to accessible, contextualized, and useful data to support its decision-making and protect billions of dollars in investment in the United States.

Through funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is leading the Industry Proving Grounds (IPG), a multi-million dollar effort to radically improve the delivery and industry uptake of climate data. Through the IPG, NOAA is helping key sectors of the U.S. economy–architecture and engineering, re/insurance, and retail–make climate-smart investments and build resilience. By integrating users at every stage of the service delivery model, from identifying user needs to rapidly prototyping and launching new products, the IPG is iteratively co-developing capabilities industry is asking for.

A select group of legacy NCEI applications have been identified for the refactoring and modernization initiative funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Industry Proving Grounds(IPG) contract. The Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS), WxCoder, and Global Summary of the Month/Global Summary of the Year (GSOM/GSOY) software suites have been selected to kick off the rejuvenation effort. The Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS) is a joint program between the NWS, FAA and DoD that serves as the nation’s primary surface weather observing network. The current legacy WxCoder software suite is the ingest system for NWS Cooperative Observer Program observations gathered via the WxCoder system housed by the Western Regional Climate Center. The Global Summary of the Month and Global Summary of the Year datasets contain a monthly and yearly resolution of meteorological elements from 1763 to present. Refactoring and modernization tasks include functional enhancements, consolidation and streamlining of procedures, updating technology, simplifying the code base, redesigning operational techniques, and implementing cloud readiness to improve performance and robustness, increase ease of operability and application uptime, and reduce cost of maintenance.