A Future of Collaboration: The Continuing Evolution of a Global Integrated Observing System (Invited Presentation)

The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) provides secure and timely access to global environmental data and information to both promote and protect the Nation’s environment, security, economy and quality of life. Within just the past couple years a new generation of environmental satellites have become operational including GOES-16, GOES-17, NOAA-20, and soon COSMIC-2. The keynote will outline how these new satellites, emerging private-public partnerships, strategic relationships across the globe and future architecture planning allow NESDIS to meet the growing needs for environmental information in a rapidly changing technological environment.

NESDIS has benefited from strong bi-lateral partnerships with national meteorological agencies EUMETSAT and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) for years, and will continue to do so for years to come. Through expanding transparent and robust partnerships with U.S. agencies and with partners around the world through such fora as Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS), Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), and Group on Earth Observations (GEO), NESDIS envisions an even greater interagency coordination on strategic, scientific and outreach support for optimal societal benefits. NESDIS has also generated Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) to strengthen the governmental-industry relationship to acquire, analyze and utilize data with ever greater applications, and is exploring through controlled experiments secure operations in the cloud to improve our systems efficiency, resilience, and cost-effectiveness while expanding our product suite.