The NOAA National Data Centers including the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) have embarked on a modernization program under the NOAA Virtual Data System initiative. One of the principal goals of this initiative is to establish an Online Data Store concept of operation.
Customers will experience direct access, ordering, and retrieval of many products, data, and information.
The monthly serial publications produced by NCDC are an example of products placed in the On-Line Data Store. Electronic access should improve the efficiency of the NCDC operation.
In May 1998, Local Climate Data (LCD), STORM Data, and Monthly Climatic Data for the World (MCDW) will be available on the worldwide web. In August 1998, the Hourly Precipitation Data (HPD) and Cooperative Data (CD) publications will also be available on line. Subscribers will be given the option of electronically retrieve the publication. NCDC will discontinue printing and mailing paper copies of the LCD, STORM, and MCDW publications beginning in June 1998 and of the HPD and CD publications beginning in August 1998.
To electronically access these publications on the net, point to NCDC's home page at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov.
A listing of 16,661 binary products currently routed through the National Weather Service Telecommunications Gateway (NWSTG) of NOAAPORT is available on the NWS Systems Operations Center web page at:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oso/notices/notices.shtml.
A GOES 10 loop consisting of 15 minute imagery provides a close up look of the Nashville storms of 4/16 at:
http://www.cira.colostate.edu/ramm/rmsdsol/main.html.
The NOAA Long Term Climate Monitoring Council held its first meeting at the end of February. Among other issues, the Council identified a number of critical problems in the climate observing program that require priority attention. The recommendations have been forwarded directly to Dr. Baker and include the following:
