Member Highlight: NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC)

The National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) is part of the National Environmental Satellite Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. NOAA/NESDIS operates three national data centers: NGDC, the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), and the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). NGDC provides stewardship, products and services for marine geological and geophysical data, Earth geophysical data, and solar-terrestrial data from the ionosphere to the surface of the sun.

Interesting Project: 

NGDC adopted the Agile software development framework in 2012 pulling developers embedded in the scientific disciplines together as a cohesive development team. This approach converged with an enterprise development focus for NGDC as a means to move away from the proliferation of stovepipe applications, and towards software where maintenance and sustainability are primary goals. One accomplishment of the team based approach to development is the NGDC Data Extract System (NEXT). NEXT provides a general data-access service for data managers through a simple and scalable retrieval architecture. The initial system supported three data sets and recently added support for trackline data with discovery and access provided by a rich user interface. Trackline Geophysical Data Access System has a decoupled ordering UI which is integrated with both our map viewers and asynchronous extract system. Efforts on NEXT continue with renewed focus as we support Sandy project specific data discovery and access.

Why we participate in ESIP:

NGDC has been a partner with ESIP since 2004 and historically contributes information relating to metadata management and standards. Besides sharing knowledge in this arena, NGDC looks to ESIP for guidance on best practices in data management, stewardship and preservation.

Link: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/
Type: I
Joined: 2004
Voting Rep: Eric Kihn