Current Status, Challenges, and Opportunities for NOAA Satellite Data Distribution

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is targeting to transform the current stove-piped satellite ground systems into a common services-based ground enterprise to meet the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)’s strategic objective of developing agile and scalable ground capabilities. The new ground architecture needs to be flexible, extensible, and adaptable to new missions and capabilities of NOAA’s next generation satellites. It also must be more sustainable, secure, and user-friendly for satellite data distribution to national and international satellite data users.

An enterprise-level architecture analysis has been performed to analyze the current NOAA satellite data distribution capability and develop a baseline architecture through the analysis. We also conducted some initial studies for moving current data distribution capability into a new and service-oriented cloud-based architecture framework. This paper will discuss 1) the current NOAA satellite data-distribution baseline architecture; 2) the challenges NOAA faces to the current data-distribution capability as data demand increases in the future; and 3) Opportunities that a service-oriented architecture framework provides for the future customer data requirements