About NOMADS
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Project
- Partnerships
- Benefits
- Future
- Staff
-
Frequently Asked Questions
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Overview
To address a growing need for remote access to high
volume numerical weather prediction and global climate
models and data, the National Climatic Data Center
(NCDC), along with the National Centers for
Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Geophysical
Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), initiated the NOAA
Operational Model Archive and Distribution System
(NOMADS) project. NOMADS addresses model data access
needs as outlined in the U.S. Weather Research Program
(USWRP) "Implementation Plan for Research in
Quantitative Precipitation Forecasting" and Data
Assimilation to "redeem practical value of research
findings and facilitate their transfer into
operations." The NOMADS framework was also
developed to facilitate climate model and observational
data inter-comparison issues as discussed in documents
such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC 1990, 1995, 2001) and the U.S. National
Assessment (2000). NOMADS is being developed as
"A Unified Climate and Weather Archive" so that
users can make decisions about their specific needs on
time scales from days (weather), to months (El Nino),
to decades (global warming).
The following presentation provides an
overview of the NOMADS project:
NOMADS Project Overview - 2005 (.pdf 2.6 MB)
NOMADS is a network of data servers using established
and emerging technologies to access and integrate model
and other data stored in geographically distributed
repositories in heterogeneous formats. NOMADS
enables the sharing and inter-comparing of model
results and is a major collaborative effort, spanning
multiple Government agencies and academic
institutions. The data available under the NOMADS
framework include model input and Numerical Weather
Prediction (NWP) gridded output from NCEP, and Global
Climate Models (GCM) and simulations from GFDL and
other leading institutions from around the world.
The goals of NOMADS are to:
- improve access to NWP and GCM's model output and
provide the observational and model data assimilation
products for Regional model initialization and
forecast verification,
- promote improvements to operational weather
forecasts,
- develop linkages between the research and
operational modeling communities and foster
collaborations between the climate and weather
modeling communities,
- promote product development and collaborations
within the geo-science communities (ocean, weather,
and climate) to study multiple earth systems using
collections of distributed data under a sustainable
system architecture.
Partnerships
The NOMADS framework is actively partnering with
existing and development activities including the
Comprehensive Large Array Stewardship System (CLASS);
the National Oceanographic Partnership Program's (NOPP)
National Virtual Ocean Data System (NVODS); the
Department of Energy's Earth System Grid (ESG); and the
Thematic Real-time Environmental Data Distributed
Services (THREDDS) project being developed through the
National Science Foundation and Unidata. To
ensure that Agency and Institutional requirements are
being met, the NOMADS collaborator's have established
Science and Technical Advisory Panels. These
newly established panels would ensure the NOMADS system
and metadata architecture could provide necessary
inter-operability; and develop data archive requirement
recommendations to NOAA.
For a list of participating organizations, see NOMADS
Partners.
Benefits
NOMADS fosters system inter-operability by integrating
legacy systems and emerging technologies and existing
metadata conventions used for models and observational
data. NOMADS relies on local decisions about data
holdings. Loosely combining legacy systems, while
developing new ways to support data access to valuable
data, permits NOMADS to work on the cutting edge of
distributed data systems. In this effort, no one
institution carries the weight of data delivery since
data are distributed across the network, and served by
the institutions that developed the data. The
responsibility for documentation falls on the data
generator; with the Advisory Panels ensuring overall
quality and systems standards, and to determine which
NOMADS data are required for long-term storage.
Further, NOMADS in no way precludes the need for
national centers to maintain and support long-term
archives. In fact, NOMADS and secure data
archives are mutually supportive and necessary for
long-term research. The primary science benefit
of the NOMADS framework is that it enables a feedback
mechanism to tie Government and university research
directly back to the NOAA operational communities,
numerical weather prediction quality control and
diagnostics processes at NCEP, and climate model
assessments and inter-comparisons from around the
world.
Future
Both researchers and policy makers alike now expect our
national data assets to be easily accessible and
interoperable with each other, regardless of their
physical location. As a result, an effective
interagency distributed data service requires
coordination of data infrastructure and management
extending beyond traditional organizational
boundaries. Under NOMADS and its collaborators,
NOAA will be at the forefront of a
worldwide-distributed data-serving network. This
will allow users at any level, to obtain weather and
climate information. This will allow the users to
make better, informed decisions about how nature will
impact their future, either in their life or in their
business decisions. For further information
contact the NOMADS PI, Glenn Rutledge at
Glenn.Rutledge@noaa.gov.
NOMADS Staff
Glenn Rutledge
NOMADS Project Manager
NOAA Meteorologist / Physical Scientist
Glenn.Rutledge@noaa.gov
(828) 271-4097
Danny Brinegar
Physical Scientist
(828) 271-4773
Dan Swank
(STG) Meteorologist / System Analyst & Data Management
(828) 271-4007
Steven Anthony
(STG) Computer Scientist / Web & Software Development
(828) 271-4474
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