This Web site is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Direct administration of the computer systems is handled by the National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Information presented on these pages is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. Use of appropriate photo and image credits is requested. Agency seals and logos cannot be used without the written permission of the agency.

Visitor information collected by the Web servers is necessary in order to share their contents with visitors. (View visitor rights under the Privacy Act). The technical information collected (see example below) identifies what part of the Web site a visiting computer wishes to reach, and where to send the requested information once it is found. For site management, this technical information is also used for statistical analysis. Summary statistics are used for such purposes as assessing what information is of most and least interest, identifying usage trends over time, determining technical design specifications, and identifying system performance or problem areas. This Web site collects no personally identifiable visitor information unless the visitor chooses to provide it.

Any additional visitor information collected on the site is for a specific purpose identified on the site. Submitting voluntary information constitutes visitor consent to the use of the information for the stated purpose.

Electronic mail sent to addresses listed on this Web site is treated no differently than any other electronic mail. All electronic mail transactions are handled by electronic mail servers, and do not pass through this Web site, nor are they monitored or recorded by this site in any way.

Electronic mail addresses submitted to this site are used exclusively for the purposes stated below:

Due to the sheer volume of data being delivered by the Web site and the distributed nature of the service provided, it is necessary to require electronic mail addresses for notifying users when their requested data is ready for retrieval. Users’ electronic mail addresses are kept in the system for three days for the purposes of delivering their data request. After three days, addresses are automatically removed from the system.

1. No persons involved with NOS DataExplorer share information on specific electronic mail addresses with any other public or private entity for any purpose than to communicate this notification to the requestor.
2. Specific addresses are never reported on individually or used in any way to track the behavior of any specific user.
3. Electronic mail addresses are used for site monitoring and basic reporting which is used to determine the health and stability of the site as well as to provide the numerical measures of success against which NOS DataExplorer is judged. All reports are aggregations of requests for the purposes of reporting on:

• the overall volume of requests processed to evaluate the utility of the system.
• the speed of handling specific requests, used to evaluate opportunities for performance tuning the system.
• the throughput averages of all requests for a given period.
• general demographics of the user community, specifically, the average numbers of users from .gov, .com, .net, .org and .edu suffixed servers.
• the popularity of specific datasets across all requests for reporting back to the NOS program offices’ generating the data.
• assist in managing system error control. In the event a users request is not completed the electronic mail address will provide administrators with a key to find and re-process a data delivery per a users request.

This Web site does not use persistent tracking technologies including Web "cookies."

For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, this government computer system employs hardware and software to monitor network traffic and to identify unauthorized attempts to add or alter information, or otherwise cause damage or interfere with information delivery. Except for computer security or law enforcement investigations, no attempt is made to identify individual users or their usage habits. Raw data logs may be stored indefinitely for use in statistical analysis or to protect the security and integrity of the computer system.

Unauthorized attempts to add information or alter information on this service are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act.

Please note that other National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web sites may have different information collection practices. If interested, please consult their site-specific privacy statements for details on such policies.

If you have any questions or comments about the information presented here, please forward them to nos.web@noaa.gov.

Example of information collected by this Web site

Web servers keep a record of their activity in a log file. Every time a visiting computer requests a file from the Web server, a log entry is recorded. A typical log file entry for this Web site looks like this:

10/04/00 13:19:18 OK 200 somemachine.somenetwork.com Mozilla/4.75 (Macintosh; U; PPC) http://othermachine.othernetwork.com/neatsites.html "oceanservice.noaa.gov" :welcome.html 15208

What this entry means: