Global Change Science Requirements For Long Term Archiving

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects and manages a wide range of environmental and geospatial data to fulfill its mission requirements-data that stretch from the surface of the sun to the core of the earth, and affect every aspect of society. With limited resources and enormous growth in data volumes, NOAA asked the National Academies for advice on how to archive and provide access to these data. This book offers preliminary principles and guidelines that NOAA and its partners can use to begin planning specific archiving strategies for the data streams they currently collect. For example, the book concludes that the decision to archive environmental or geospatial data should be driven by its current or future value to society, and that funding for environmental and geospatial measurements should include sufficient resources to archive and provide access to the data these efforts generate. The preliminary principles and guidelines proposed in this book will be refined and expanded to cover data access issues in a final book expected to be released in 2007.

CEOS was established under the auspices of the Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations in 1984 in response to a recommendation from a panel of experts in remote sensing within the Working Group on Growth, Technology and Employment (CEOS, 2009). The panel recognized the collective value of the world’s Earth remote sensing capabilities and the advantages that would be gained by the coordination of civil Earth observing satellite missions. By cooperating in mission planning and the development of compatible data products, applications, services and policies, the national space programs would maximize the bene?ts of their individual inve- ments and be able to better address the environmental challenges of the entire international community. CEOS was to serve as the focal point for this inter- tional coordination and to provide the forum for the change of policy and technical information. The members of CEOS are governmental organizations that are international or national in nature and are responsible for a civil space-borne Earth observation program that is currently in operation or in an advanced stage of system devel- ment. CEOS also has established Associate Members that are similar governmental organizations with a civil space-segment activity in an early stage of system dev- opment or those with a signi?cant ground-segment activity that supports CEOS objectives. Associate Members may also be existing satellite coordination group and scienti?c or governmental bodies that are international in nature and have a signi?cant programmatic activity that likewise is aligned with the goals of CEOS.

This is the second of two Space Studies Board reports that address the complex issue of incorporating the needs of climate research into the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). NPOESS, which has been driven by the imperative of reliably providing short-term weather information, is itself a union of heretofore separate civilian and military programs. It is a marriage of convenience to eliminate needless duplication and reduce cost, one that appears to be working. The same considerations of expediency and economy motivate the present attempts to add to NPOESS the goals of climate research. The technical complexities of combining seemingly disparate requirements are accompanied by the programmatic complexities of forging further connections among three different agencies, with different mandates, cultures, and congressional appropriators. Yet the stakes are very high, and each agency gains significantly by finding ways to cooperate, as do the taxpayers. Beyond cost savings, benefits include the possibility that long-term climate observations will reveal new phenomena of interest to weather forecasters, as happened with the El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Conversely, climate researchers can often make good use of operational data. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the needs of all the parties involved in NPOESS should conspire to foster creative solutions to make this effort work. Although it has often been said that research and operational requirements are incommensurate, this report and the phase one report (Science and Design) accentuate the degree to which they are complementary and could be made compatible. The reports provide guidelines for achieving the desired integration to the mutual benefit of all parties. Although a significant level of commitment will be needed to surmount the very real technical and programmatic impediments, the public interest would be well served by a positive outcome.

Decades of evolving U.S. policy have led to three sectors providing weather servicesâ€"NOAA (primarily the National Weather Service [NWS]), academic institutions, and private companies. This three-sector system has produced a scope and diversity of weather services in the United States second to none. However, rapid scientific and technological change is changing the capabilities of the sectors and creating occasional friction. Fair Weather: Effective Partnerships in Weather and Climate Services examines the roles of the three sectors in providing weather and climate services, the barriers to interaction among the sectors, and the impact of scientific and technological advances on the weather enterprise. Readers from all three sectors will be interested in the analysis and recommendations provided in Fair Weather.

Reliable collections of science-based environmental information are vital for many groups of users and for a number of purposes. For example, electric utility companies predict demand during heat waves, structural engineers design buildings to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes, water managers monitor each winter's snow pack, and farmers plant and harvest crops based on daily weather predictions. Understanding the impact of human activities on climate, water, ecosystems, and species diversity, and assessing how natural systems may respond in the future are becoming increasingly important for public policy decisions. Environmental information systems gather factual information, transform it into information products, and distribute the products to users. Typical uses of the information require long-term consistency; hence the operation of the information system requires a long-term commitment from an institution, agency, or corporation. The need to keep costs down provides a strong motivation for creating multipurpose information systems that satisfy scientific, commercial and operational requirements, rather than systems that address narrow objectives. Resolving Conflicts Arising from the Privatization of Environmental Data focuses on such shared systems.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects, manages, and disseminates a wide range of climate, weather, ecosystem and other environmental data that are used by scientists, engineers, resource managers, policy makers, and others in the United States and around the world. The increasing volume and diversity of NOAA's data holdings - which include everything from satellite images of clouds to the stomach contents of fish - and a large number of users present NOAA with substantial data management challenges. NOAA asked the National Research Council to help identify the observations, model output, and other environmental information that must be preserved in perpetuity and made readily accessible, as opposed to data with more limited storage lifetime and accessibility requirements. This report offers nine general principles for effective environmental data management, along with a number of more specific guidelines and examples that explain and illustrate how these principles could be applied at NOAA.