On March 19, 2014, White House climate advisor John Podesta and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren announced a new climate data initiative to make federal climate data more accessible to support climate change preparedness nationwide. The anchor of the initiative is the climate.data.gov website, a subset of the government’s open data website data.gov. The first wave of the initiative is focused mainly on coastal flooding and sea level rise and includes more than 100 federal datasets on the website.
As part of the initiative, NOAA and NASA made announcements aimed at encouraging private companies and developers to make the available raw data more usable for decision-making. The two agencies announced an “innovation challenge” encouraging web developers to leverage publicly available data to develop new visualization tools to help communities plan for and adapt to community coastal inundation. In addition, NOAA released a Big Data Request for Information seeking comment from potential private sector and academic partners to assist the agency in making a greater percentage of the massive amounts of data (20 terabytes daily) more accessible to the public via “usable products or services.”
The White House also garnered commitments from several universities and private companies. For example, Google and Microsoft are donating cloud storage for climate data research as well as access to high-performance computing capabilities. ESRI is publishing a series of visualization tools to help cities prepare for extreme events, and Intel is sponsoring “hackathons” focused on climate resilience in the Chesapeake Bay, New Orleans and San Jose areas. The announcement of the climate data initiative also includes examples of data-driven tools from Circle of Blue and the Alliance for Water Efficiency.