NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) - Helping to Change the Landscape for Engineers

NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) provides critical environmental data via the cloud that drives innovation and resilience across multiple societal sectors, including engineering. The scalability via the cloud allows users to directly access, use, and integrate NOAA datasets into a variety of engineering analyses, enabling rapid and agile analysis to changing environmental and climatic conditions that impact infrastructure or availability of energy. Use of NODD data via the cloud expands the ability for engineers and energy forecasters to integrate impact-based data with environmental data from multiple sources to expand and conduct complex analysis quickly, which supports. This is key for integrating climate and environmental resilience in projects, particularly where forecasters have to rapidly respond to extreme weather events.

This presentation discusses perspectives from two engineering case studies accessing NOAA’s weather data via NODD. In the transportation sector, namely HNTB, a leader in civil and transportation engineering, is using NOAA data via the cloud to quantify extreme rainfall events, better understand the risks faced by groups of assets, such as roads and bridges, and to communicate statewide threats to non-technical stakeholders. Similarly, in the energy sector, NOAA data—such as High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) forecasts—is integrated by software solution providers, namely Camus Energy. Camus’s analytics using HRRR enable grid operators to optimize renewable energy integration to balance energy demands based on real-time weather conditions. In both cases, cloud-based scalable analyses aid in understanding and analyzing scenarios for building resilient design considerations to account for future climate challenges.