The Evolution of NOAA's Value Model

The NOAA mission value model (NOAA Observing System Integrated Analysis, NOSIA) is a very large portfolio analysis model that includes hundreds of NOAA products and services and several hundred observing programs important for meeting NOAA's missions. NOSIA is designed to assess the impact of these observing programs to a mission area and to answer several business questions relevant to changes in the observing portfolio at NOAA.

This talk will describe the continued development of NOSIA to address NOAA’s evolving missions, observing priorities, and observing capabilities. The representation of NOAA’s missions in the value tree has evolved from NOSIA-II (CIRCA 2013) to beyond 2025. New missions include: Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) that will merge numerical weather prediction capabilities across several spatial and time scales; Warn-on-Forecast that is expected to leverage increased observing capabilities to increase tornado, severe thunderstorm, and flash flood warning lead times; and enhancing operational space weather monitoring and forecasting and the Space Weather Follow On initiative that will extend solar observations beyond FY 2022. The dependence of NOAA’s products and services on observing capabilities that did not exist when NOSIA-II was surveyed has also evolved. New operational capabilities expected include: Coronagraph observations, Space-based direct observations of 3-D winds, Thermospheric observations, Aurora, and Space-based total lightning detection in real-time. NOSIA-II has been adapted to several specialized studies in the past year to examine the return on investment for proposed space-based observing architectures, to rank order observing capability improvements by benefit to various missions, to examine how new observing capabilities might improve watches and warnings, and to assess the impact of spectrum interference on geostationary satellite imagery and on rebroadcast for a variety of observing platforms critical to operations. This talk will also briefly summarize refresh activities for NOAA’s observing portfolio, requirements, and value tree and the harmonization of these data in the information management system called Earth Observing Requirements Evaluation System (EORES), and it will summarize the development of new data mining activities using Interactive data visualizations and dashboards.