NOAA’s Data Strategy: Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset

NOAA’s expertise and the authoritative stewardship of its data are central to an overall NOAA data strategy. Through its Big Data Project, NOAA is engaging commercial partnerships in ways that meet both the partners' business models and NOAA's commitment to increasing access and use of NOAA open data. Evolving data management and access models comes with an opportunity for NOAA to shift resources from redundant government-owned hardware and many discipline specific access points to additional data quality and subject matter expertise needs. Early success stories include enhanced open access to NEXRAD weather radar data, GOES-16 satellite imagery, and to the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset -- a key input to the study of global climate trends.

With this shift toward data access and use on Partners’ cloud platforms, NOAA must carefully consider an overall strategy that ensures authenticity and timely availability of NOAA’s data to users, allowing their value to be fully realized by all. The NOAA data strategy must also afford fair and equitable access to these data services across all users and scientific disciplines. This presentation will describe an effort to facilitate management of all NOAA data as a strategic asset, and note linkages with the President's Management Agenda as part of an emerging overall Federal Data Strategy, as well as with the Department of Commerce’s Strategic Plan.