The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) mission is to observe, understand, and predict changes in the environment. The information products that result from carrying out this mission are distributed locally, nationally, and internationally and impact nearly every sector of society. These include warnings of severe weather, navigation charts, regional long-range weather outlooks, fishery stock assessments, flood forecasts, stratospheric ozone depletion analyses, the national geodetic reference grid, coastal tidal predictions, and assessments of greenhouse gases effects on global climate. NOAA information products find critical use in many aspects of commerce, science, agriculture, law, education, and everyday life. No building is constructed, no ship sails, no crop is planted, no roadbed is laid, and no power plant is planned without referencing NOAA environmental observations and information products.
Historically NOAA has made large leaps forward in fulfilling its mission through the application of technological advances to providing more accurate and complete environmental assessments and more timely distribution of information products to the Nation. This includes early application of supercomputer technology to operational weather prediction, using Earth-observing satellites to monitor the oceans and atmosphere, and the application of telecommunication technologies to global environmental data acquisiton and product distribution. NOAA finds itself once again at the threshold of such an opportunity to make a quantum leap forward in the quality and timeliness of its environmental information delivery to the Nation. The IITA component of the HPCC Program represents a means by which NOAA, along with the other participating agencies, will parlay the national investment in computing and communications technology development into significant and measurable benefit to the national well-being.
With IITA enabling technologies, NOAA can make literally thousands of environmental observations from across the Nation and the globe available instantly to the analyst or forecaster; the agency's environmental observing systems, whether land-based, ocean-based, or satellite-borne, can be integrated with observing systems of other agencies or other nations into a virtual national or global environmental monitoring system; its historical databases of environmental observations and information distributed across the Nation at scores of sites can be seamlessly integrated along with other-agency environmental databases into a virtual national database and placed at the fingertips of the researcher, policy maker, lawyer, businessman, educator, or any other user; national policy with regard to sustainable development can be made with the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and best environmental information available, integrated with economic and human-dimension information; the geometrically growing volume of environmental data and information can be effectively and automatically quality- controlled, integrated, synthesized, archived, and retrieved.