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TAO wins 2003 Grace Hopper Award | |
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| TAO wins Government
Technology Leadership Award The NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory’s Tropical-Atmosphere-Ocean (TAO) project has received the 2003 Grace Hopper Government Technology Award (a “Gracie Award”), for “Leadership in the innovative application of information technology that contributes to the advancement of scientific knowledge and its application.” The TAO network of moored ocean buoys, monitoring El Nino in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, is a premier Ocean Observing System and is a cornerstone which supports NOAA's mission of improving seasonal to interannual climate forecasts. From the inception of the project to the present day, the TAO project has been widely viewed as a model in the Ocean Observing System community for effective use of information technology to provide government services to science and the general public (http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/). The prestigious Grace Hopper Government Technology Leadership Awards are sponsored by Government Executive magazine and selected by a panel comprised of leading experts on the federal government’s use of technology, drawn from government, prominent federal contractors and the academic community. The Grace Hopper Government Technology Leadership Awards, also known as “The Gracies”, highlight outstanding use of technology in government by recognizing projects making exceptional contributions to mission accomplishment, cost effectiveness and service to the public.
Category: Leadership in the innovative application of information technology that contributes to the advancement of scientific knowledge and its application Purpose of Project: The Tropical-Atmosphere-Ocean (TAO) network of moored ocean buoys, monitoring El Nino in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, is a premier Ocean Observing System and is a cornerstone which supports NOAA's mission of improving seasonal to interannual climate forecasts. From the inception of the project to the present day, the TAO project has lead the Ocean Observing System community in successful application of information technology to further advance scientific knowledge and applications. The TAO website provides easy, user-customizable access to both historical and realtime data, graphics, animations and 3-D visualizations, as well as up-to-date technical information on buoy systems, sensor accuracies, sampling characteristics and a comprehensive resource suite of web pages focused on El Nino. The website, at http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/, is continuously updated in order to utilize the most recent and appropriate information technologies, including JavaScript, Java applets, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, and FLASH, to provide the highest possible level of functionality and user satisfaction. Impact on Business: Data from NOAA’s El Nino buoys are available in real-time and incorporated into routine weather and climate forecasts made at meteorological forecasting centers throughout the world. The data are used widely by the research community involved in climate studies focusing on El Nino and La Nina, and are also used extensively for educational purposes at primary to postgraduate school levels. Questions once answered by telephone or personal contacts are now provided through Web Pages, and customized graphics and data files are now created by the user on the website, resulting in decreased costs for the TAO project and increased user satisfaction. A testimonial to the impact of TAO is provided by Professor Peter Niiler at Scripps Institute of Oceanography: "With the … remarkable TAO array, PMEL has become the global operational data center for the real-time description of El Nino....It is in the analysis and wide distribution of this data with which PMEL oceanographers have left an indelible mark on our science." Benefits of Project: The TAO website received a total of 22.4 million hits during the 12 month period from September 2001 to August 2002. During the same time period, a total of 9862 separate web user requests delivered 109,350 customized data files to a wide range of institutions, and for a wide range of applications, ranging from climate research and prediction to high school science projects. Log files show that that website accesses are spread across a broad spectrum of government, educational, commercial and international users. A review of the TAO web site appeared in EOS, Transactions of the American geophysical Union on 10 September 2002, the final lines of which read: “This site is highly recommended to any interested in ENSO science. Bookmark this site and visit it frequently.” TAO is widely viewed as a model for effective use of information technology to provide government services to science and the general public. Next Steps: The TAO project has entered into discussions with ESRI, a world leader in the GIS software industry, with the objective of making realtime El Nino Ocean Observing System data readily accessible, for the first time, through the Geography Network, an international GIS website reaching a large new community of users. The Geography Network is used by the public and a broad educational/academic community and supports major geospatial data needs such as the National Geographic's "Map Machine", and the Associated Press "Map Shop". As an example of the visibility of these services, on any single day, over one million people use ESRI GIS software, and within a week of its debut, the National Geographic's Map Machine web site received 4 million hits per day. TAO has launched a project to become the first Ocean Observing System to utilize the industry standard XML and SOAP technologies to make their realtime and historical data available as a “Web Service”. Once published, the TAO Web Service can be automatically located and invoked by other Web Services and applications through a simple programming interface. This will be the first Ocean Observing System to utilize these technologies, and will eliminate current ad hoc methods for creating custom data files. Replication: TAO continues to be
viewed as a model of how information technologies can be effectively applied
to handling and disseminating Ocean Observing System data and information.
Technologies such as GIS and Web Services are unconventional for Ocean
Observing System data, but will be applied appropriately to broaden accessibility
and utility of TAO data as the project forges ahead to include the GIS
user community and provide the machine-to-machine services that can support
access through computer applications and support assimilation into climate
and weather models. Contact information |
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