A collaboration between Google and The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has added many new datasets to those available on Google Cloud. The datasets have been added as part of the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program and NOAA's Big Data Project.

Google Cloud will host 5 petabytes of this data across Google products, including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Google Earth Engine, and Kaggle. The stored data is available at no cost, though usual charges may still apply (processing, egress of user-owned data, for example). Google Cloud Public Datasets are designed to make it easier to access high-demand public datasets. The data is hosted in BigQuery and Cloud Storage, with more than 100 public datasets from different industries. You can query up to 1 TB of data/month at no cost.

The agency is providing public access to its environmental datasets in the cloud in accordance with its open data policies. NOAA generates tens of terabytes of data every day from satellites, radars, ships, weather models, and other sources. All that data is directly available to the public, but its availability on public cloud platforms makes the data a lot easier to explore and avoids the costs and risks involved with federal data access services.

The NOAA Big Data Project (BDP) was created to explore the potential benefits of storing copies of key observations and model outputs in the Cloud to allow computing directly on the data without requiring further distribution. The image below shows a representation of data from Pathfinder Sea Surface Temperature, specifically a visual depiction of the mean nighttime sea surface temperature across the globe in 2006 (NOAA)

Datasets that are available include real-time satellite imagery, more than 20 years’ worth of the National Water Model, historic storm event data, aggregated lighting strike data, precipitation data back to the 1700s, and data on shipping patterns dating back to the 1600s.

You can find more details on the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program pages.

More Information

Google Cloud Public Datasets Program

NOOA Big Data Project Homepage

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