Making Data Available on the Cloud for Decision Support Applications through NOAA's Big Data Project

Multiple datasets have been made available through several cloud platforms through NOAA’s Big Data Project. These data are available as part of an experiment in the collaborative distribution of NOAA’s open data via non-governmental cloud-based systems and services. In 2015, Cooperative Research and Development Agreements were signed by NOAA with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft Azure, and the Open Commons Consortium. NOAA’s data have been integrated into commercial and research-grade decision-making tools, and increased usage of these data has been observed as compared to historical usage patterns. Both realtime and archived data are available alongside significant processing and data-handling capabilities in support of the development and implementation of decision-making applications, including artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. NOAA satellite imagery, water model output, weather radar, fisheries data and climate information are among those datasets hosted by the Big Data Collaborators’ cloud platforms. The ability to efficiently translate these data to discoverable and understandable information on the cloud will be discussed.