III.3: Climate Database

Modernize the NOAA climate database

Other Information:

What’s New – Digitizing data from weather stations collected in the 18th and 19th centuries The Climate Data Modernization Program (CDMP) supports NOAA’s responsibility to collect, integrate, assimilate and effectively manage Earth observations on a global scale, ranging from atmospheric, weather, and climate observations to oceanic, coastal, and marine life observations. Many of these data were originally recorded on paper, film, and other fragile media. Prior to CDMP, not only were these valuable data sources mostly unavailable to the scientific community, but storage technology for the archive had become obsolete. Today, CDMP has greatly improved the preservation of and access to NOAA’s holdings by migrating many of these resources to new digital media. CDMP has placed online over 53 million weather and environmental images that are now available to researchers around the world via the Internet. The amount of data online has grown from 1.75 terabytes in 2001 to over 11 terabytes in 2009. Hourly weather records digitized through CDMP continue to be integrated into NOAA’s digital database holdings, extending the period of record for many stations back into the 1890’s. Additional daily data records digitized through the CDMP will extend this data period back to the 18th Century for several weather stations.

Stakeholder(s):

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

Content