A new public-private-partnership announced by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, yesterday will bring together Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft Corp., and the Open Cloud Consortium in a big data project aimed at NOAA data. The goal of the project is to bring the Commerce Department closer to providing its vast environmental data resources to the public. Secretary Pritzker made the announcement during a keynote address at the American Meteorological Society’s Washington Forum.
The collaboration will be established through cooperative research and development agreements with Commerce. The big data partners will then work to research and test solutions for bringing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) information to the cloud for use by both the public and private industry.
Secretary Pritzker called Commerce “America’s data agency,” in her remarks. ““The Commerce Department’s data collection literally reaches from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun,” she said.
NOAA gathers over 20 terabytes of data every day – more than twice the data of the entire printed collection of the United States Library of Congress. This environmental intelligence comes from a wide variety of sources, including Doppler radar systems, weather satellites, buoy networks and stations, tide gauges, real-time weather stations, as well as ships and aircraft. However, right now only a small percentage of this valuable data is easily accessible to the public. The demand for this data has increased, and it is imperative to find ways to effectively and efficiently distribute this data to decision makers and industries.
Last year, NOAA issued a Request for Information to engage private industry to help make NOAA’s data available in a rapid, scalable manner to the public. This process led NOAA to the agreements with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft, and Open Cloud Consortium.
Additional information about this project, including contacts for each of the anchor companies, can be found at http://data-alliance.noaa.gov.
