The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) extended a request for information on a potential enterprise data exchange to share weather observations across the globe. Responses are now due by June 17.
The RFI notes that NOAA is looking to add more data to its existing inventory of weather data, and is exploring the possibility of hosting a marketplace for international and commercial entities in the cloud.
“Globally, the acquisition and exchange of environmental data faces challenges in terms of limited infrastructure and imperfect governance mechanisms, hindering the weather enterprise from achieving its full potential,” NOAA states.
The agency is looking towards a solution that would overcome those challenges by facilitating sharing through a cloud-based platform that can facilitate easier sharing of data, and work through the regulatory framework as well.
NOAA is looking to collect data on existing off-the-shelf solutions that may cover requirements, the time and cost needed to develop a platform, security measures needed, and policies that may stand in the way.
“Moving beyond mere updates to data-sharing policies that are largely unenforceable, and beyond incremental updates to ageing infrastructure, a future global data exchange should foster investment and continual innovation, and have the ability to support growth of high quality environmental data from established and emerging players, both governmental and commercial,” the RFI notes.