Expanding the Scope and User Community of NOAA's Climate Data Records (CDRs)

NOAA established a satellite Climate Data Record Program at its National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI, formerly the National Climatic Data Center) to provide sustained and authoritative climate information from satellite data. The CDR Program has expanded to include not only the traditional uses of the academic/scientific community, but also the many potential uses of NOAA's CDRs for decision-making, risk management activities in the federal, state, and local government, and private sector applications. User engagement feedback has provided insight into the types of data that users need, as well as the spatial and temporal subsets. This natural progression and expansion of CDR users has led to recent improvements which include: updating the CDR information web page; decreasing product latency; dataset discovery, access, and sub-setting capabilities; alternative data formats; and cloud applications via Google and Microsoft. The sustained production of multi-decadal inter-calibrated satellite, in-situ, and blended CDRs feed directly into decision applications and tools for ease of use across a broad community of users.