Cloud Computing

Open Cloud Consortium Forms Alliance with NOAA to Release Environmental Data

• By Rhea Kelly
• 04/30/15

The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a nonprofit cloud infrastructure provider focused on scientific, medical, healthcare and environmental data and research, is beefing up its environmental data offerings through a new agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The collaboration will make more of NOAA's environmental data available to the public, making it easier to find and access the data for research and analysis.

"Ease of access to NOAA's wealth of climate, weather, and environmental data will have an enormous impact on researchers across many disciplines. The purpose of the Open Cloud Consortium collaboration with NOAA is to make finding and accessing this data easier for the academic, nonprofit and research communities, to enable scientific analysis and to drive discovery," said Robert Grossman, director of the Open Cloud Consortium, in a prepared statement.

Part of the Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC) ecosystem, the OCC's open source data commons co-locate data, storage and computing infrastructure tools for analyzing and sharing data. The organization currently boasts a "petabyte-scale data commons encompassing a wide array of disciplines including 1000 Genomes Project data, NASA's Modis and Landsat satellite images, the General Social Survey, Project Gutenberg, and many others," according to a press release. All the data, including datasets from the NOAA, is freely available to download or access via APIs. In addition, "individuals and groups with OSDC resource allocations can conduct analysis or build data products without having to transfer datasets to their local environments."

The NOAA alliance will be managed as part of the OCC's Open Science Data Cloud Working Group. For more information, visit the NOAA site.