Geospatial Based Analysis to Assess NOAA’s Ocean Observing System Architecture Regarding Requirement Fulfillment

The Office of Technology, Planning, and Integration for Observation (TPIO) is responsible for managing NOAA's observing system architecture portfolio and supports observing system decision-making by generating analysis products that are critical for investing and improving future observing systems. In 2015, TPIO was responsible for responding to the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) recommendation #2 from the 15-96 report regarding NOAA's portfolio of observing systems and additional steps needed to achieve an integrated, cost-effective portfolio. The recommendation was to “analyze the extent to which unnecessary duplication exists in NOAA's portfolio of ocean observing systems.” A gap analysis tool was used to assess how well NOAA's current ocean observing system portfolio meets priority 1 user observation requirements identified from the GAO 15-96. Our analysis found there to be no duplication in NOAA ocean observing systems. TPIO has been developing new capabilities that could improve upon the analysis done in 2015 by allowing for the geographic coverage and horizontal resolution of a requirement to be compared geospatially with and observing system's capabilities and their ability to meet the requirement needs. In this project we recreated aspects of the 2015 gap analysis using the requirement for Ocean Surface Winds: Direction measurements within the US Economic Exclusion Zone (US EEZ) as well as system attribute data and geospatial data from the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC). The purpose of this project was to assess if a geospatial analysis would be effective at identifying the specific areas where gaps in requirement geographic coverage and horizontal resolution exists, relative to NOAA observing system capabilities. This type of analysis has the ability to show exactly where the requirement is not being fulfilled as well as areas where system platforms may not be optimally deployed to meet requirement needs. Identification of these gaps would be an improvement on the previous analysis and provide information essential to making important observing system funding and development decisions.