New techniques for climate and drought information delivery at the national climatic data center

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) recently established a web portal infrastructure to provide products and services through the US Drought Portal (USDP), the NOAA Climate Services (NCS) Portal, and the Pacific Region Integrated Climatology Information Products (PRICIP) Portal.

The USDP is the public face of the National Integrated Drought Information System. The NCS Portal represents a step toward integrating NOAA's climate services through a common interface. PRICIP is focused on providing information to communities vulnerable to storminess and the associated strong winds, heavy rains, and high seas throughout the Pacific. The three systems utilize a common back-end hardware and software infrastructure with custom tools for the provision and display of data and services which include:

• Web Mapping Viewer – provides visual display of physical elements through Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant services.

• Integrated Data Viewer – provides visual depictions of climate data time series leveraging existing Flash-based technology that can be tied to the Map Viewer.

• Access to communities where experts or parties interested in a particular topic can interact and share documents.