The use of the latest information technology, coupled with more timely and complete environmental information provided by the government, is essential for U.S. industry to succeed in the highly competitive global marketplace.
American industry already makes substantial use of real-time and historical weather and other environmental information from NOAA to optimally route airplanes, trucks, and ships, thereby minimizing transit time and fuel consumption and assuring safer travel.
More timely access to more comprehensive environmental information will support both day-to-day and long-term business decisions by thousands of large and small companies. Marketing and distribution decisions, key ingredients in economic growth, are driven by readily available information. Companies are already using high performance computing technology pioneered by the HPCC Program to sort through extremely large volumes of data, seeking patterns for potential sales of products and services that will both minimize resource consumption and maximize bottom lines. Increased availability of the Nations vast amounts of environmental data on the NII will allow companies to improve the ways their inventory and distribution operations respond to changing weather conditions across the nation. This increases productivity and serves customers better. Weather sensitive indicators can be better factored into product development and marketing activities to achieve additional increases in productivity.