NOAA's environmental data system requirements: in search of a distributed data management system

NOAA's data holdings and user demand for data are both growing rapidly. By the year 2001, we expect to have over I petabyte of environmental data in our archives and to service nearly a million users per year. The archives will be distributed across NOAA, while our users will be both national and international. The modern NOAA data and information management system must serve all users transparently while efficiently handling these tremendous volumes of data.<
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