The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Services (NESDIS) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is responsible for the Long Term Stewardship (Archive) and Access for environmental data collected by a variety of ground-based and space-based observing systems. The three NOAA National Data Centers (NNDC), National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC), and the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) perform these functions. The NCDC, Asheville, North Carolina, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, and other activities has embarked on a modernization project that will, within the next two years, implement a highly automated web-based access system. This system will provide for the continuous daily delivery of the most recent Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) observations directly to the robotics storage system at the NCDC, as well as, provide rapid and easy search, browse, and retrieval of GOES data by users via the World Wide Web.

The first phase of this project will be completed by the end of December 2001. This phase includes the transition from the delivery of GOES data on 3590 tapes every several days to the continuous direct delivery of new GOES data via telecommunications networks between Asheville, NC, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. These data will be directly imported to the automated robotics storage system at NCDC. User requests, can then be made via the current web-based On-line Store, which will allow quick delivery of GOES data via the Internet (or the Abilene network for researchers) or on a variety of magnetic tapes (3480, 3590, 8mm). These new procedures will improve customer servicing by a factor of 10 to 50. Phase two will be to develop a web-based Geographical User Interface (GUI), which will provide customers the capability to search inventories, browse images, make selections, and order GOES images and data in various formats via the Internet. The long term goal is to provide to customers a unified GUI interface for both the Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) and GOES satellite data with the capability to add new satellite systems.