The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) generates a vast amount of valuable Earth systems information that describes the weather, oceans, and climate. Because this data is dispersed across dozens of web sites, finding the appropriate information can be difficult and time consuming. NOAA's information needs to be more easily accessible so that the public can better ensure its safety and welfare.

Earth Information services could provide integrated access, visualization, and analysis of NOAA's information. These services could provide customized warnings of hazardous conditions, assist with economic decision-making, or simply help with planning ordinary daily and recreational activities. For example, one could obtain timely hurricane, tornado, and severe weather forecasts, travel road conditions or marine predictions that apply to a particular location and event. Now that viable technology is available that can offer these services, NOAA can begin working toward providing them in a convenient way as a set of integrated Earth information services.

We will describe the Earth Information Services concepts and investigate existing frameworks. This will include prototype work being done at NOAA's Earth System Research Lab (ESRL) with probabilistic forecasting and at various universities through the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Environmental Technologies (ISET) program.