How NOAA's Data Powers American Lives, Economy, and Innovation

There are few federal agencies that average Americans interact with more than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) within the Department of Commerce. If you have ever checked your local weather to decide what to wear that day or followed coverage of an impending storm to determine if you should add an extra loaf of bread to your shopping list for the week, you’ve used NOAA data to inform your decision-making. 

The Data Foundation often points to NOAA as a premier example of how leveraging data improves society. In a virtual session for SXSW in 2020 on innovating with open data, the Data Foundation led a discussion with a former NOAA administrator to discuss the power of open data to promote government transparency and accountability and solve important issues facing the public. During the discussion, the former NOAA official described the decision to make NOAA’s sophisticated weather models available as open-sourced code, emphasizing that by making its models open, NOAA could harness the vast expertise of academia and industry to collaborate, innovate, and improve the accuracy of weather predictions.

Watch the whole webinar here

NOAA's mission to share information with the public makes it a vital source for shaping both daily decisions and emergency responses related to changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts. Through its partnerships across government, industry, academia, and local communities, NOAA transforms data into action – protecting lives during severe weather events, empowering local officials to safeguard their communities, and fueling American innovation and economic growth through the collection and dissemination of high-quality, timely environmental data.

SAVES LIVES. Communities need timely, reliable data to enable rapid response and ensure community preparedness when it comes to responding to emergencies like severe floods, fires, storms, or other extreme weather events. NOAA’s fire observation systems, for example, allowed officials to monitor and predict the path of the January 2025 wildfires that decimated parts of Los Angeles, providing the data needed for communities to issue early evacuation warnings – saving countless lives. In 2024, NOAA satellite data assisted in the rescue of 411 people through its Search and Rescue Satellite system, and NOAA’s national weather forecasts inform the decisions of emergency managers across the country to mitigate detrimental health effects from events like extreme heat.

SUPPORTS THE ECONOMY. The environment underpins a robust economy, and NOAA’s data has an outsized impact on ensuring the nation's economic prosperity. NOAA’s work contributes to the U.S. economy across industry sectors, from transportation and warehousing to agriculture, mining, construction, and retail trade – to only name a few. For example, NOAA open data on water levels, currents, and other oceanographic observations improves navigation of ports and waterways that contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. The NOAA fisheries team identifies and partners with state and local groups to ensure the continuity of a resilient seafood industry – a hundred-billion dollar industry. Coastal data has direct effects on the 40% of the U.S. population living in coastal communities, tracking rising tides, informing flood insurance, and affecting property values. The reinsurance industry also uses NOAA data in risk assessments to offer traditional insurance providers financial protection against losses in costly extreme weather events.

DRIVES RESEARCH. NOAA-led research enables innovations that equip NOAA to produce life-saving data products and support U.S. economic output. Through partnerships with industry and academia, NOAA explored new ways to harness technologies like artificial intelligence to identify patterns in data, maximizing agricultural productivity by enhancing the accuracy of precipitation forecasts to help farmers decide which crops to plant and when as one example. NOAA teams deploy aircrafts and robots to collect data in the center of storms or the bottom of the ocean – data that further improves predictive models and contributes to an understanding of how exactly our environment works. Research like this drives American innovation, allowing NOAA and other partners to build advanced models and reveal insights that impact our daily lives and economic vitality. 

This commitment to open data yields powerful real-world applications. In the Data Foundation’s 2022 Research Symposium, a private sector organization presented its research and strategy to build a tool that leverages NOAA data to assess climate risk factors 30 years in the future, down to the level of a street, property, house, or 100-meter segment of roadway. 

The examples detailed here are only a glance into the scope of NOAA’s data products and impact, demonstrating how open, public data drives innovations across sectors, enabling new insights and information sharing to develop better products for the public. NOAA provides foundational data, research, and services on coasts and oceans, resource management, and space and weather that helps the public make key determinations in their lives, contributes to a resilient economy, and spurs innovation across sectors. The Data Foundation has amplified how NOAA uses the power of government data to inform critical decisions, and will continue to champion examples of how open data and evidence can make society better for everyone.