The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s (NOAA) Strategic Plan indentifies four Mission Goals and a Mission Support Goal with four Sub-Goals, each with several subordinate Programs. NOAA's Line and Staff Offices execute activities required to support these Goals through the NOAA Programs. Each Program has documented the observational requirements it needs to accomplish its NOAA mission in the NOAA Consolidated Observation Requirement List (CORL) – to date there are over 1700 documented observation requirements across the 20 NOAA programs (out of a total of 49 programs) that have observation requirements. NOAA also maintains an inventory of Observing Systems (NOSA) and Information Management Systems (IMS) correspondingly in a database called CasaNOSA.

In this paper, we present a streamlined process for observation requirement collection, documentation, verification and validation. These observation requirements are compared against observing system capabilities to generate observation capability gap. This gap analysis is the essence of the NOAA Observation Requirement Assessment (NORA) documents generated for each of NOAA's over 300 observation requirement variables. We present examples of NORAs for some hydrologic variables such as precipitation, snow cover and soil moisture. We also present how this observation gap analysis is used in the NOAA investment strategy.