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2 Background
Pages 12-31

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From page 12...
... Currently, NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) operates three National Data Centers -- the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
From page 13...
... down to small facilities that maintain certain retrospective records for research or operational applications. For example, the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory holds several specialized data sets, such as hydrology and hydraulics data for the Great Lakes, that are used in research activities and made available to external users. Each data center and center of data represents an important component of NOAA's data management enterprise, and collectively they are responsible for "acquiring, integrating, managing, disseminating, and archiving environmental and geospatial data and information obtained from worldwide sources to support NOAA's mission." As discussed in the paragraphs that follow, some of NOAA's data management activities are codified in the form of legislative mandates, administrative orders, or agreements with other entities, but these documents typically do not spell out specific requirements and responsibilities for individual data sets or derived products, and in many cases they are not accompanied by dedicated funding to accomplish the required activities.
From page 14...
... The full scope of activities performed by NOAA's three National Data Centers is described in detail in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. In the broader context of global change research, the Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires "an early and continuing commitment to the establishment, maintenance, global measurements, establishing worldwide observations .
From page 15...
... 212-15 is the most relevant document for guiding environmental data management across the agency. It contains an assortment of important and encouraging mandates such as "NOAA data management planning will include end-to-end data stewardship"; that NOAA program managers should "ensure that during the initial planning of new programs NOAA Line and Staff Office requirements for new data are identified"; and that "data are considered, and are to be treated as, corporate assets." However, the requirements and mandates provided in this and other documents are often not very specific, leaving data managers with considerable flexibility, but also little guidance, for determining which data sets to archive.
From page 16...
... . Archiving and providing access to satellite data, which tend to be especially voluminous and complex, has been a particularly challenging area for interagency cooperation.
From page 17...
... The United States is also a signatory to a number of international agreements relating to climate and global change that either explicitly require NOAA to archive certain data or call for actions that can be carried out only if reliable data archives are in place. Several World Data Centers operating in the United States under the International Council for Science are housed within NOAA.
From page 18...
... Simply archiving and providing access to these "large-array" data streams poses a significant data management challenge, but this challenge is magnified when considered in the context of NOAA's other data management activities. For example, many of the nation's most pressing environmental problems require 14  NOAA 2007 budget request "blue book," available at http://www.corporateservices.
From page 19...
... satellites, fixed and mobile radars, research aircraft, buoys, ships of opportunity, and mesoscale networks. NOAA also generates and collects a large and rapidly growing volume of reanalysis data and model output, as well as multiple versions of various reprocessed observational data, each of which raises its own data management issues (see Chapter 5)
From page 20...
... 20 ENVIRONMENTAL DATA MANAGEMENT AT NOAA Figure 2-2  NOAA NESDIS data archive volume projections, including backup copies, in petabytes. (SOURCE: Updated March 2007 from NOAA, 2003.)
From page 21...
... All the different data streams managed by NOAA are important for answering environmental questions, and each is associated with unique data management challenges. The data centers have evolved in part to address these unique challenges.
From page 22...
... The DMC has broad latitude and authority to coordinate data management activities and make data management decisions for NOAA.16 One of the primary objectives of this report is to provide the NOSC and DMC with the information they need to integrate sound data management principles with the NOAA Observing Systems Architecture (NOSA) and throughout the entire NOAA data management enterprise.
From page 23...
... "improve efficiency and reduce costs by bridging the barriers between existing, independent ‘stovepipe' systems and integrating the data management activities of all NOAA programs, while avoiding a fully centralized approach." The GEO-IDE concept of operations specifically advocates a federated approach to achieve these goals and Figure 2-3  A vision for GEO-IDE (SOURCE: Lautenbacher, 2006.)
From page 24...
... CLASS currently provides storage and online access to NOAA's largearray satellite data and satellite-derived products, but CLASS is planned to evolve into a "unified enterprise data access system that centralizes NOAA's numerous data systems" and provides "long-term, secure storage and access to data, information, and metadata of NOAA's archived assets" (NOAA, 2006d)
From page 25...
... The extent to which the data handled by CLASS can be effectively integrated with other environmental data streams, including those collected by other federal agencies, also remains to be seen. Finally, the huge data volumes projected to be handled by CLASS will require substantial, ongoing resources to support the hardware and personnel needed to provide reliable archive and access capabilities.
From page 26...
... Previous reports from the National Research Council (NRC) and other entities have helped set the stage for this report by documenting and analyzing data management practices from various perspectives and by providing findings and recommendations that can be readily applied to the environmental data streams and data management activities at NOAA in particular.
From page 27...
... It should be noted, however, that data access improvements that bring current satellite data archives to bear more effectively on problems with demonstrable societal benefits would support the argument to maintain an adequate space-based environmental observing system. The future evolution of U.S.
From page 28...
... : • Improved and continuous access to environmental satellite data is of the highest priority for an increasingly broad and diverse range of users. • The national and individual user requirements for multiyear climate system data sets from operational satellites are placing special demands on current and future data archiving and utilization systems.
From page 29...
... • Early and ongoing cooperation and dialog among users, developers of satellite remote sensing hardware and software, and U.S. and international research and operational satellite data providers are essential for the rapid and successful utilization of environmental satellite data.
From page 30...
... plan.17 As implementation of IOOS/DMAC takes shape, two things are obvious: data archiving and access capabilities are required components in all end-to-end data management systems; and all agencies that collect data need to ensure these capabilities through a formalized data management plan. Other relevant reports pertaining to the challenges of data archiving include the International Council for Science (ICSU)
From page 31...
... BACKGROUND 31 essential elements and then applied to NOAA's current data management challenge. The challenges faced by NOAA include not only how to be a wise steward of such a broad range of data managed at its three National Data Centers and centers of data, but also how to meet its growing data archive and data access demands with limited resources.


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