NOAA 01-R309
CONTACT: Patricia Viets, NOAA NESDIS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(301) 457-5005
September 28, 2001
NOAA's NATIONAL CLIMATIC DATA CENTER
CELEBRATES 50 YEARS OF SERVICE
The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the world's largest active archive
of weather data, will celebrate its 50th anniversary on October 5, 2001.
Located in Asheville, N.C., the center provides valuable climate information
and is an integral part of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
NCDC annually processes millions of requests for climate data, which is
used extensively in areas that affect our daily lives. This information is
applied in the design and construction of buildings, bridges, roads and
dams; heating and air conditioning systems; transportation systems; and
remote sensing systems.
Data provided by the center have been used as a key component in the design
of a new municipal airport facility in Texas and a high speed rail between
Orlando International Airport and Walt Disney World. The Federal Aviation
Administration also utilized NCDC data during the development of new
instrument landing systems for 55 major U.S. airports.
As NOAA's primary data storehouse, NCDC archives nearly 98 percent of all
NOAA environmental data. In a typical month the center's web access
systems logs approximately 300,000 users who download more than 7 million
data files. The center's historical archives contain one petabyte of
digital data, which if stored on CD-ROM and stacked horizontally would
be equivalent to 44 football fields long. NCDC also archives more than
1.2 million microfiche and 200 million paper records. Paper and
manuscript records date back to the early 1700s and are useful to
researchers trying to reconstruct the climate record.
Tracing its roots as part of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy Weather
Records Center, NCDC was established as the National Weather Records
Center in 1951. The center is now part of NOAA's National Environmental
Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), the nation's primary
source of space-based meteorological and climate data. NESDIS operates
the nation's environmental satellites, which are used for weather
forecasting, climate monitoring and other environmental applications such
as fire detection, ozone monitoring and sea surface temperature
measurements. Including NCDC, NESDIS operates three data centers,
which house global data bases in climatology, oceanography, solid earth
geophysics, marine geology and geophysics, solar-terrestrial physics,
and paleoclimatology.
To learn more about NESDIS, please visit
http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/
For additional information about NCDC, please see:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
Contact Tom Ross at (828) 271-4499 or by e-mail:
tom.ross@noaa.gov for more
information on NCDC anniversary activities planned during the week of
October 1-5, 2001.
