The NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS): growing pains and a look to the future

The NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) project recently completed its third year of operation. NOMADS servers now provide terabytes of model data to hundreds of users every month. NOMADS leverages community and in-house software development efforts across multiple institutions to provide and promote distributed format neutral access and model inter-comparisons to weather and climate models and observational and reanalysis datasets. This paper describes the current NOMADS system architecture and the new data sets available, scalability issues, a new NASA partner, and a future NOMADS capability to expand its data holdings for user access to both satellite and radar data. This paper also describes a potential scenario for NOMADS as a pilot for a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) using a roadmap as developed by the NOAA Data Management Integration Team (DMIT) in support of the Integrated Earth Observation System (IEOS) under the USGEO.