Type of change: Discontinue website hosted at NGDC.
During 2002 Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., USN (Ret.) called for a fundamental review of NOAA's strengths and opportunities for improvement. A Program Review Team reviewed and debated issues and developed suggestions for building a better NOAA. These suggestions led to a recommendation to have a centralized planning approach for integrating NOAA observing systems and indicated a clear need for a NOAA-wide observing system architecture.
NOAA responded by creating the NOAA Observing System Architecture (NOSA) Action Group, which led the charge on having a website and backend database created to store information about NOAA's observing system architecture. The goals of this IT project were: design observing systems that support NOAA's mission and provide maximum value, avoid duplication of existing systems, and operate efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. NOSA includes: NOAA's observing systems (and others) required to support NOAA's mission, The relationship among observing systems including how they contribute to support NOAA's mission and associated observing requirements, and the guidelines governing the design of a target architecture and the evolution toward this target architecture.
NGDC no longer receives funding for maintaining information stored in the underlying relational database, and some of the search tools are no longer maintained to serve the initial purpose of the website. The contents of the database will be transferred to NOAA's Technology, Planning, and Integration for Observation (TPIO) Office.
The point of contact is Dan Kowal, at dan.kowal@noaa.gov or at 301 683-3230. Send comments to Dan Kowal, dan.kowal@noaa.gov or call 301 683-3230.