Obama administration freeing up 20 terabytes of environmental data

abernard102@gmail.com 2015-04-23

Summary:

"The Commerce Department is partnering with five leading technology outfits to make 20 terabytes of environmental data available for easier access and analysis by the public. The move, announced by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker in an address at the American Meteorological Society on Tuesday morning, could open up new markets for environmental information just as profound challenges related to global warming and other environmental threats come to the fore. With much more data made available, existing companies and new startups can innovate to provide new products that help predict climate change, issue life-saving weather warnings and protect depleted fisheries, for example.  The partnerships are with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft and the Open Cloud Consortium. The collaborations are being established through cooperative research and development agreements, which outline the data alliances led by each of the companies.  In addition, such information provides the foundation for research in the private and public sectors, and more data could lead to breakthroughs that are impossible to foresee at this point but hold potentially huge economic benefits. According to a Commerce Department press release, these alliances will consist of public and private sector organizations, which will help test solutions for bringing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) information to the cloud. Data from NOAA already supports the multi-billion dollar weather, climate and fishing industries.  Every day, NOAA generates 20 terabytes of data, which is more than twice the data of the entire printed collection of the United States Library of Congress, per an agency press release; this data comes from satellites orbiting in space to buoys bobbing in the Pacific Ocean. The agency also runs sophisticated models of the climate system generates severe weather warnings nationwide ..."

Link:

http://mashable.com/2015/04/21/obama-20-terabytes-data-cloud/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.psi oa.government oa.usa oa.noaa oa.open_science oa.environment oa.climate oa.cloud oa.industries oa.data oa.announcements

Date tagged:

04/23/2015, 07:04

Date published:

04/23/2015, 03:04