White House Announces New Online Climate Data Initiative

The White House announced Wednesday an effort to make federal climate data more accessible on data.gov - the central site for US government data resources.

Known as the Climate Data Initiative, the new allocation of information will make it easier for the public to find climate data obtained by various federal agencies including NASA, NOAA, the US Geological Survey, the Department of Defense and other federal organizations.

The new initiative is currently in its pilot stage and can be accessed here.

In blog post Wednesday on the climate site, readers were advised that the site can be used to by individuals, communities and companies to help better understand and prepare for the impacts of coastal flooding and sea level rise.

"Over time, this community will expand to include more datasets, web services, and tools; it will also cover other themes such as the vulnerability of the food supply and the threats to human health from climate change," the blog said.

The Climate Data Initiative will also include design competitions to help illustrate the extent to which Americans are vulnerable to climate change. NASA and NOAA will be initiating competitions in the future that call on researchers and developers to create data-driven simulations to help future preparedness efforts and increase public education about vulnerability to climate change, the White House said Wednesday.

The joint statement, authored by John Podesta, a counselor to President Barack Obama, and John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, went on to announce that Google will donate one petabyte - or 1,000 terabytes - of cloud storage for climate data, as well as 50 million hours of high-performance computing with the Google Earth Engine platform.

"Every citizen will be affected by climate change-and all of us must work together to make our communities stronger and more resilient to its impacts," Podesta and Holdren said.

"By taking the enormous data sets regularly collected by NASA, NOAA, and other agencies and applying the ingenuity, creativity, and expertise of technologists and entrepreneurs, the Climate Data Initiative will help create easy-to-use tools for regional planners, farmers, hospitals, and businesses across the country-and empower America's communities to prepare themselves for the future."