Implementation of the Meteorology and Oceanography Geospatial Initiative at the Naval Oceanographic Office

The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) is charged with the collection and processing of oceanographic data worldwide in direct support of military operations. They are also a co-producer of digital products with the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). They currently provide more than 1600 products a year in support of warfighter operations. The Meteorology and Oceanography (METOC) Geospatial Initiative (MGI) is designed to be part of an overall end-to-end reengineering of their production so that features can be derived directly from our data holdings, properly attributed, and made available to both NIMA and Department of Defense (DOD) for military operations. They provide products, to numerous multi-agency customers including Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Defense Commanders in Chief, and U.S. Government agencies. MGI will reengineer NAVOCEANO production processes to build METOC datasets as fully attributed geospatial information. The datasets will comply with DOD-adopted feature and attribute coding standards. In this way, their products will be interoperable with those of NIMA. They anticipate that these products will be directly usable in military operations, especially on geographic information system (GIS) enabled electronic displays. The purpose of this effort is to provide systems engineering services, in phased increments, to bring NAVOCEANO production areas within the domain of standards-driven co-production. This paper describes the background and rationale for entering into a major reengineering effort that will result in a geospatially enabled production environment at NAVOCEANO.