On March 19, the White House 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, NASA and NOAA announced an “innovation challenge” on community coastal inundation. The challenge is part of NASA’s space apps program, which encourages developers to leverage publicly available data to develop new visualization tools. 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 including MIT, ESRI and Google to use the data to develop new tools and data insights.