Data Buys, Metadata Management, and a Novel Web Application: A 2024 Real-Time Case Study

With the increased need for scientific transparency and leveraging community-wide open science capabilities to drive operational outcomes, I present a case study on start-to-finish FAIR data use to drive new discoveries. In 2024, the NOAA-Saildrone Atlantic Hurricane Mission embarked on a fourth year of study using uncrewed surface vehicles, or saildrones. As NOAA performs a “data buy” from Saildrone, the workflows to serve rapid and delayed data via ERDDAPs involve detailed metadata management and file creation that are unique to such processes and have required continual conversation and problem solving across NOAA and its commercial partners. Additionally, an interactive, shareable, lightweight web page application was developed that included a datatable and a visual map of recent locations and parameters. This application was intended exclusively for those planning hurricane overflights to coordinate with saildrones, but was quickly shared with a variety of mission collaborators. This rapid sharing and adoption of the application demonstrated its usefulness broader than the intended audience. Furthermore, it illustrates that the use of FAIR-compliant data services through ERDDAP allows for visualization tools with specific requirements to be easily connected to services without the need to develop new formats, access points, metadata, or copies of existing data.