Supporting Local Decision Making through a Comprehensive Community Driven Data Tool

A central part of NOAA’s mission is to develop and distribute scientific data, including large-scale climate, weather, marine, and coastal information for regional and national analysis. NOAA has also developed local data gathering tools on an as-needed basis. While these approaches demonstrate the power of local data collection, no existing tool meets the broad needs of environmental community groups leading such efforts. Significant challenges hinder both the collection and distribution of local-scale data, and aggregation into large-scale data sets. Our proposed method, community driven data (CD2) collection, assists decision makers and data collectors, with the goal of combining local information to create regional and national level data. We aim to research and design our CD2 application and demonstrate its feasibility to: (1) connect community groups with existing NOAA data sources relevant to decision making needs; (2) provide a platform for deploying new mobile collection forms, engaging the group members/volunteers, and standardizing the data prior to aggregation in a data warehouse; and (3) utilize a web-based portal for connecting subscribers to regional and national aggregations of collected data.