Past, Present and Future Challenges for NOAA's nowCOAST GIS Web Mapping Portal

NOAA/National Ocean Service’s nowCOAST (https://nowcoast.noaa.gov) is an operational GIS-based web mapping portal which provides coastal users with situational awareness of present and future environmental conditions. nowCOAST integrates and displays observations, analyses, imagery, warnings, forecasts and model forecast guidance from NWS, NOS, and NESDIS, and is used daily by a variety of user communities including commercial and recreational mariners, emergency managers at all levels of government, National Weather Service, U.S. Dept. of Defense, offshore oil/gas platform operators, coastal managers, and risk and financial managers. nowCOAST experiences 400-500 million web hits per month, especially during months with significant weather events, such as land-threatening tropical cyclones, tornado outbreaks, and large wildfires.

Work on the first version of nowCOAST began in 2000 at NOS’ Coast Survey Development Laboratory using funds from a competitive internal grant from NOAA’s Environmental Services Data and Information Management (ESDIM) Office. Constructed using the latest GIS web mapping technology at the time, nowCOAST became available on the Web in August 2002 with a simple interactive map viewer. The viewer provided geo-referenced hyperlinks to web pages of NOS, NWS, and USGS displaying near-real-time observations or point forecast guidance. Over the next 18 years, nowCOAST steadily improved as to meet the growing needs of users and partners for reliable, near-real-time geospatial meteorological, hydrologic, and oceanographic data and information. Advances in web mapping technology allowed nowCOAST to provide maps via time-enabled web map services, animate data on its map viewer, and give users more choices for basemaps and overlays. New visualization techniques from academia were used to generate maps of winds and currents from NOAA’s high-resolution weather and ocean forecast models. A revamped and more efficient data ingest system allowed nowCOAST to process more datasets from across NOAA encoded in a variety of data formats, especially as the spatial and temporal resolution of datasets increased. Finally, the establishment of NOAA’s Integrated Dissemination Program infrastructure provided the opportunity for nowCOAST to finally be hosted in high availability, operational 24 x 7 hosting facility starting in September 2015.

Although there have been many successes, there also have been many challenges—both organizational and technical--in the development and operation of nowCOAST, many of which are not uncommon for software development projects in the federal government. Organizational challenges include the difficulty in attracting and retaining developers due to limited funding, insufficient manpower to continue development while at the same time providing 24 x 7 support, and coordinating dissemination of data originating from multiple NOAA agencies and divisions. Technical issues include the work needed to detect, report, and develop workarounds for bugs in map server software, lack of advanced monitoring systems, and difficulties in dealing with the spatial, temporal, and format differences between various NOAA datasets. These challenges will likely continue into the future while nowCOAST faces a new serious challenge: how to keep up with the rapidly increasing demand on its map services (300% increase in web traffic since October 2015) while balancing cost with the ability to meet user requirements. Potential solutions being actively investigated include a transition to open-source map server software, commercial cloud integration, tile caching, and client-side rendering.