Page 1 How Much Weather Data Is Enough For Commercial Industry? NWS Partners Meeting,18 June 2008

Page 2 Data Storm Commercial Industry says: Give us the data – Be careful what we wish for Every 20 to 30 years, high tech sensors (e.g., satellite and radar) and models increase data density by two orders of magnitude Two new major systems GOES-R and NEXRAD-R (MPAR or CASA) to greatly stress IT infrastructure within a decade – Cost of data storage and communications does not decrease commensurately per byte when new weather systems increase information – Machine processing capacity has to increase in order to convert raw information into useful information via algorithms since humans cannot process the raw data quickly enough Industry and government agencies cannot afford to backhaul all raw data for processing

Page 3 Weather Radar System Data Growth

Page 4 The Right Data & Information Strategy What will work for government and industry from cost and information standpoint – Push all data to industry and government agencies on demand (National Data Center) –Push all data for industry and government agencies to “staging locations” so that information is available to process (e.g., Regional Data Centers) – Push all data to one national location and process to data subset (lower resolution) available to industry and government agencies – Expose all data via web services for collection at national or regional based on rules for industry and government agencies in order to control bandwidth consumption (not all data is needed all the time) – Expose some data (lower resolution) via web services

Page 5 Working on Solutions Roles for Commercial Industry and NOAA –Commercial industry to define its needs with knowledge of what is being developed and input information to NOAA Understand the costs for data accessibility from government standpoint as well as its own standpoint Contribute ideas to architecture and standards to be used – NOAA to keep weather enterprise well informed of developing infrastructure plans for future weather systems Provide clearinghouse of information (Private/Public Partnership web page) on weather system development with respect to weather data type and sizing information Provide methods and standards being considered for transport of data (dissemination) and allow industry comment Provide IT and data architecture planning information to industry and allow industry comment