Abstract:
With the rapid rise in the development of Web technologies and climate services across NOAA, there has been an increasing need for greater collaboration regarding NOAA's online climate services. The drivers include the need to enhance NOAA's Web presence in response to customer requirements, emerging needs for improved decision-making capabilities across all sectors of society facing impacts from
... climate variability and change, and the importance of leveraging climate data and services to support research and public education. To address these needs, NOAA embarked upon an ambitious program to develop a NOAA Climate Services Portal (NCS Portal). Our goal is for the Portal to become the "go-to" website for NOAA's climate data, products, and services for all users.
At this time, the NCS Portal prototype only scratches the surface of the many climate datasets, products, and services available across NOAA. This effort will gradually transition from a prototype to an operational status over the next year. Our plan is to actively gather user feedback through focus groups, usability studies, and informal communications. Over the next several years, we will expand the NCS Portal's scope and functionality in a user-driven manner to greatly enhance the accessibility and usefulness of NOAA's climate resources. As this effort continues to expand in future years, partners from outside of NOAA will become involved in this effort. The NCS Portal will be a central component of NOAA's commitment to enhancing the access to and extensibility of climate data and services, timely articles and information, education resources, and tools for engagement and decision-making.
The NOAA Climate Services Portal, for its initial prototype, has focused on developing the infrastructure and capacity to showcase a wide breadth of climate information to our users. The process of adding content to this infrastructure is in its early stages and has initially focused on several datasets and products from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, Coastal Services Center, and Climate Prediction Center, among others. The initial intent is to highlight some of most popular datasets/products based on customer usage of the data. These initial datasets and products represent only a very small fraction of the climate information available across NOAA. Our longer term goal is to present a broader spectrum of climate information as the project matures.
In addition to customer usage, the initial datasets and products were selected based on the availability of detailed FGDC metadata which are "searchable" via the Data Library function in the NCS Portal. FGDC metadata is a long-standing federal requirement that was adopted by the NCS Portal project to allow distributed datasets and products to be accessible and searchable from a central location. We have built upon this standard to ensure that the key fields in the metadata record are populated with required information. This will be an ongoing effort -- to provide access to additional datasets and products as the Portal team further engages with other NOAA partners. Over time we expect to make all of NOAA's climate datasets available via the NCS Portal, but for those interested in datasets not accessible via the NCS portal, they may still be obtained by directly accessing NOAA's data centers and centers of data, and other resources:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov
http://csc.noaa.gov
http://www.ncddc.noaa.gov
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/regionalclimatecenters.html
http://www.noaa.gov/climate.html
[Summary provided by NOAA.] 
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