A New Approach to Climate Services at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has collected and stewarded irreplaceable environmental data and products for decades. It currently maintains more than 7 petabytes of data produced from in-situ, satellite, radar, and paleoclimate observations and numerical models. Each day, NCDC adds about 7 terabytes of new data and products. Although these data are publicly available, the scientific community and select other sectors (e.g., legal) were historically the most common users. In the past decade, as climate concerns have become more prominent, other sectors have been more aggressively tapping NCDC's resources. To support this growth and in concert with the President's Climate Action Plan (2013) and NOAA priorities, NCDC is overhauling its climate services activities. Specifically, NCDC recently began implementing a new strategic plan for engagement designed especially to expand private sector support and services. The plan harnesses NCDC's current sectoral and regional climate service programs, as well as its customer services and communications activities, to provide a proactive and coordinated approach to growing user awareness, understanding, access and use of NCDC resources. Importantly, it also facilitates improved NOAA products and services through the purposeful capture of evolving user needs and requirements. In this presentation, we describe the drivers, approaches and expected outcomes of this new approach as NCDC supports the Nation's growth in climate resilience, preparedness and environmental intelligence.