National Weather Service GIS Data and GIS Enterprise

The National Weather Service's (NWS) mission states, in part: “NWS data and products form a national information database and infrastructure which can be used by other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public, and the global community.” This goal combined with the increased demand from partners and customers for NWS data in Geographic Information System (GIS) friendly formats has resulted in efforts by many entities within NWS to fulfill this need for geospatial data. The efforts range from internal application for collecting weather related data to interactive web interfaces for viewing and accessing weather data. Project creators and their management have also expressed a need for clearly defined standards for NWS GIS friendly data and how the agency will make this data available to customers and partners. Customers and partners have likewise expressed a desire for greater decision support services and support for discovering the data NWS has available in GIS friendly formats. These varied GIS/geospatial data related interests led to the NWS initiating an effort to organize accessibility of this data into a one stop shopping page. As an overarching project, the NWS is also planning to stand-up an Enterprise Framework approach to GIS within the NWS. Both of these projects fit into the NWS's overall web, data, and enterprise architecture strategies.

In this paper, we will describe some of the projects focusing on data accessibility and how the projects are being united for the one stop geospatial data page. We will also discuss how these projects fit with the overall NWS GIS Enterprise.