NOAA's National Climatic Data Center and Coastal Services Center–enabling data discovery and interoperability

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and Coastal Services Center (CSC) have developed a number of products and services over the past several years to provide data and information in forms readily usable by a variety of customers. However, these products can be rather difficult to locate for users unfamiliar with the online systems where they reside. To address this issue, NCDC and CSC have been partnering to utilize existing metadata standards, GIS interoperability techniques, and ESRI Geoportal Toolkit software, to enhance data discovery and interoperability for customers. Some of these capabilities have been placed online and are accessible via NCDC and CSC websites, and from the NOAA Climate Services Portal. Examples include GIS Services to locate stations with various types of climatic data, climate monitoring products for various parameters, and search capabilities to allow users to locate datasets based on keywords such as temperature. In this paper we briefly describe the IT technologies being used, the services available, and a number of examples of the capabilities.