In a 2011 whitepaper titled Towards Open Weather and Climate Services, the Environmental Information Services Working Group (EISWG) of the NOAA Science Advisory Board proposed that the National Weather Service begin working toward an “Open Weather and Climate Services” (later re-envisioned as Open Environmental Information Services, or OpenEIS) paradigm. The working group identified the expansion of access to data collected and created by the NWS as one of the principal benefits of the OpenEIS approach.
Initial steps toward this goal centered around a limited-time experiment to make high spatial- and temporal-resolution model output from the NWS high-performance computing center in Reston, VA directly available to a core group of commercial and non-commercial organizations. As a representative of the university geoscience research and education community, Unidata had plans to participate in this experiment. (You can read more on the OWCS Project Page.)
In the course of defining business rules governing the experiment, NWS determined that providing data products only to the experimental core group could be construed as providing privileged access to the participants, which is prohibited by U.S. Government information policies. As an alternative, NWS will seek to expand access to model data using other existing mechanisms such as NOMADS. In the longer term, increasing access to NOAA data will fall under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Big Data Initiative.
NWS is investigating ways to provide additional access to NWS data by considering the following:
- What operational model (GFS, GEFS, NAM, etc.) customers would like enhanced output from.
- What specific output is sought from that model in terms of geographic extent, temporal sampling, vertical sampling, and parameters. For ensemble systems, what are preferences regarding sampling of ensemble members.
- What output format customers are prepared to use. In particular, NWS will be investigating whether customers are prepared to use NWP model output data in its internal numerical solution form which would allow NCEP to avoid processing steps required to cre ate files organized in common georeferenced coordinates (e.g. GRIB2) and may thus allow NCEP to further increase NWP model sampling.
- How long customers will need to have access to the enhanced model output to evaluate its usefulness for the intended application.
We encourage members of the Unidata community to read the full text of the announcement and to provide information about potential uses of expanded access to NWS model output for geoscience education and research by July 3, 2014 to:
Ben Kyger
Director, NCEP Central Operations
ben.kyger@noaa.gov
