Advancing Climate and Environmental Data Access: The Evolution of NOAA's Open Data Dissemination Program

The NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) program plays a crucial role in enhancing accessibility and usage of NOAA’s vast environmental data to the public through major cloud service providers. By leveraging cloud infrastructure, scalability, and new and innovative cloud based tools, NODD enables researchers, data scientists and engineers and decision-makers across the public and private sectors, as well as the general public, to access essential environmental data in near real-time via the cloud. Use of NOAA data via the cloud reduces barriers to entry and promotes innovation. NODD program’s evolution and recent key advancements have significantly enhanced its capacity to distribute data and support a broad range of applications and users.

This presentation discusses the evolution of the program from the lens of programmatic, technical and user engagement advancements, all of which supports users. Strengthening partnerships with cloud service providers has led to expansion of environmental data, enabling improved access to more datasets. The enhanced scalability and reduced latency in data retrieval allows users to conduct time-sensitive analyses and respond quickly to environmental changes. Technical advancements, including moving from a pull to push paradigm (or a research to fully operational production paradigm) where NOAA manages operational direct pushes and moving to enhance/support cloud optimized formats. This has led to research and operational machine learning-ready datasets, automation of data-driven workflows, and the shifting of data integration to cloud service provider platforms.

These advancements have resulted in a collaborative effort to connect with the users via a public virtual webinar series: “Office Hours.” These sessions are focused on one dataset at a time, which support users by giving them an opportunity to ask questions of NOAA scientists, data owners, and Cloud subject matter experts from the comfort of their own desks. Each Office Hours is conducted with one NOAA Line Office and a single cloud service provider. Jupyter notebooks and other visualization techniques are demoed, often with free cloud resources, so users get hands-on experience during the 1:15 minute session. These sessions are recorded, and the materials are provided via the NODD website, so users can access those materials after the event, whenever needed. In addition, NODD encourages users to ask questions or provide feedback via the nodd@noaa.gov email, and loops in the appropriate data owner or cloud service provider, as appropriate. In addition, NODD actively participates in invited industry sector engagements. NODD’s evolution highlights NOAA’s commitment to focusing on the needs of users and data accessibility and efficiency.