Double the Data: Putting Weather Observations in the Cloud Increases Access - WeatherNation

"Meteorologists and other users accessed more than twice as much U.S. weather radar data after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) partnered with Amazon and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) to make the data available in the cloud. The collaboration is part of the NOAA Big Data Project. Launched in 2015, the project aims to make NOAA’s vast storehouse of environmental data easier to access with the hope that both the public and industry will find ways to capitalize on it and spur new economic growth. Partners in the project include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft, and the Open Commons Consortium. The first dataset chosen for the project was from the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) Weather Surveillance Radar system, and the first collaborator to put that dataset in the cloud was Amazon. The entire archive of NEXRAD data, which stretches back to 1991, is now available via NEXRAD on AWS, and Amazon has partnered with UCAR’s Unidata program to update the database in real time and to provide the tools users need to make sense of the data...."