CONTACT: Patricia Viets FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(301) 457-5005 9/14/95
President Clinton and Vice President Gore recently honored an employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for her efforts to reinvent government at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Jenny Pressley, who provides climate data to customers of NCDC, was honored at the White House Rose Garden in a ceremony regarding the Administration's successful efforts at reinventing government.
Pressley's outstanding support was brought to Vice President Gore's attention by Michael Seidel of Seidel Claims Service in Glens Falls, N.Y. In a letter to the Vice President, Seidel expressed his appreciation of the outstanding service he received from NCDC, and especially from Jenny Pressley.
"Jenny Pressley literally changed my thinking about federal employees," Seidel told NCDC management. "She astonished me with her efforts to help me obtain access to climate data which I desperately needed for my business."
Pressley works in the Climate Services Division of NCDC; NCDC maintains 455 data sets to respond to more than 143,000 requests each year.
NCDC is the world's largest active archive of weather data. NCDC archives weather data obtained by the National Weather Service, Military Services, Federal Aviation Administration, and the Coast Guard, as well as data from voluntary cooperative observers. As operator of the World Data Center-A for Meteorology, which provides for international data exchange, NCDC also collects data from around the globe. The Center has more than 150 years of data on hand, this includes satellite weather images back to 1960, with 55 gigabytes of new information added each day--that is equivalent to 18 million pages a day.
NCDC stores and provides information essential to industry, science, agriculture, hydrology, transportation, recreation and engineering.