NOAA's National Climatic Data Center and Coastal Services Center – enabling data discovery and interoperability

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and Coastal Services Center (CSC) have developed a number of products and services over the past several years to provide data and information in forms readily usable by a variety of customers. However, these products can be difficult to locate for users. To address this issue, NCDC and CSC have been partnering to utilize existing metadata standards, Geospatial Information System (GIS) interoperability techniques, and ESRI Geoportal Toolkit software, to enhance data discovery and interoperability for customers. These capabilities have been made available online within products at NCDC, CSC, and the NOAA Climate Services Portal. Examples include GIS Services to locate stations with climatic data, climate monitoring products for various parameters, and ad-hoc search capabilities to allow users to locate datasets based on keywords. In this paper we briefly describe the IT technologies being used, the services available, and a number of examples of the capabilities.