Raytheon Wins NOAA Ocean Observation Case Study Contract

Raytheon Company's Intelligence and Information Systems business has been awarded a six-month, competitive contract by the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Ocean Service to develop a conceptual design, life-cycle cost estimate and viability narrative for the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). For more info, see http://finanzen.net/news/news_detail.asp?NewsNr=383287 .

Global Observing Systems Information Center

Updates to the various programs in GOOS, including the subregion IOOS efforts, can be found at http://gosic.org/ios/GOOS_ios.htm .

Hundreds of Terabytes of Data per Year

All for One and One for All

Daniel Clery and David Voss

As scientific instruments become ever more powerful, from orbiting observatories to genome-sequencing machines, they are making their fields data-rich but analysis-poor. Ground-based telescopes in digital sky surveys are currently pouring several hundred terabytes (10¹² bytes) of data per year into dozens of archives, enough to keep astronomers busy for decades. The four satellites of NASA's Earth Observing System currently beam down 1000 terabytes annually, far more than earth scientists can hope to calibrate and analyze. And looming on the horizon is the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest physics experiment, now under construction at CERN, Europe's particle physics lab near Geneva. Soon after it comes online in 2007, each of the five detectors will be spewing out several petabytes (10¹⁵ bytes) of data--about a million DVDs' worth--every year.

These and similar outpourings of information are overwhelming the available computing power. Few researchers have access to the powerful supercomputers that could make inroads into such vast data sets, so they are trying to be more creative. Some are parceling big computing jobs into small work packages and distributing them to underused computers on the Internet. With this strategy, insurmountable tasks may soon become manageable.

[more at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/308/5723/809 ]

U.S. Plan for IOOS document

The 1.8MB document is summarized in an Executive Summary, as well as supplied as a PDF link, at http://www.coreocean.org/Dev2Go.web?id=220628.

World Resources Institute's "Research Topics"

The World Resources Institute discusses some coral data integration and monitoring issues in it's Research Topics page at http://marine.wri.org/pubs_content_text.cfm?ContentID=3029

U.S. GOOS Steering Committee

Recent updates to progress of the US Global Ocean Observing System Steering Committee appear to be routinely updated at http://www-ocean.tamu.edu/GOOS/usgsc.html. A generic PowerPoint, created by Tom Malone, describing the status and plans of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) is available. A second generic PowerPoint, created by Worth Nowlin, is also available.

Benefits for GEOSS in Florida

Some Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) benefits cited by EPA can be found at http://www.epa.gov/geoss/fact_sheets/florida.html.