A Backbone Architecture for Government Observing Systems

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s recent effort to explore commercial satellite data as alternative sources to data from dedicated NOAA satellites has raised important questions. Can these data replace all or portions of NOAA data? Can that be done at lower cost, with acceptable performance and risk? Under what circumstances should NOAA maintain its own “backbone” systems even when acceptable nongovernment sources for those data are available, and what characteristics should those backbone systems have? This paper provides a framework for answering those questions. That framework defines criteria for when a backbone element is needed for any observational data and how those criteria should be evaluated to decide. The article focuses on NOAA’s spaceborne observing capability but also generalizes the approach to other NOAA observing systems such as ground-based radars and to other organizations with comparable needs.