NOAA’s budget request seeks $6.6 billion in discretionary appropriations, an increase of $224.8 million from the enacted level for fiscal year 2024. But under that request, certain programs would still see decreases, which lawmakers on the Environment Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee called into question Tuesday.

In opening remarks, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., who chairs the full committee, said he was “extremely disappointed” that NOAA’s proposed budget decreases funding for its Oceanic and Atmospheric Research division and weather and air chemistry research programs. Those programs were given additional responsibilities and increased authorizations under the bipartisan Weather Act Reauthorization passed in April.

“Yes the budget request is simply a request, and at the end of the day Congress controls the purse strings,” Lucas said. “But the budget request is also a message to all stakeholders and industry, and NOAA’s message is this: the need for improved early and accurate forecasting of severe weather is not a priority for this administration.”

Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., the subcommittee’s ranking member, expressed similar concerns in her opening remarks about cuts to programs within the OAR and the National Ocean Service. 

“These funding reductions would negatively impact NOAA’s capacity to execute coastal observations, ecosystem protection, ocean exploration, innovative research, educational outreach and many more important functions that advance the agency’s mission,” Ross said. “I hope we can discuss strategies to continue the essential work of these programs even under the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.”

The Fiscal Responsibility Act is a compromise deal that temporarily suspended the debt limit and set caps on defense and nondefense discretionary spending through fiscal years 2024 and 2025. That deal has an additional constraint to the budget process, causing agencies to make difficult choices about their investments.

The hearing also comes as science agencies and programs across the government experienced reductions in the fiscal year 2024 appropriations, including OAR. While the budget for 2025 would be an overall increase in discretionary spending for the agency, it would also decrease the agency’s National Ocean Service budget by 14% and the OAR budget by 11%, according to numbers provided by the subcommittee.

NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in his opening remarks that the budget request seeks funding for five areas: investing in the next generation of environmental satellites; addressing climate change through training professionals and expanding technology; providing science and data that informs economic development; improving knowledge-sharing and service delivery in tribal, urban, and rural communities; and reducing the agency’s maintenance backlog. 

Spinrad said NOAA is prioritizing funding for its satellite constellation. That includes development of its Geostationary Extended Observations satellite program, which the agency says aims to expand weather, climate and ocean observations. 

Notably, the National Weather Service also plans to begin transitioning the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System to a cloud framework. Spinrad said that work “will give forecasters secure remote access to provide in-person, impact-based decision support services to decision-makers anytime, anywhere.”

Another program that received attention for proposed cuts was the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System Program, known as IOOS, which uses data and technologies to provide information and forecasts for the ocean, coasts and Great Lakes.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., asked Spinrad how the fiscal year 2025 budget request proposes a $32.5 million cut, or 76% reduction, to that program’s funding, adding that she’s “concerned about some kind of budgetary cliff” when funds from the Inflation Reduction Act expire. That bill provided $3.3 billion to NOAA.

Spinrad said IOOS is one of several programs that reflects “the very difficult decisions that we had to make in this budget,” in part because of the constraints under the Fiscal Responsibility Act and the agency’s commitment to sustaining its current work, such as its investment in satellites and ensuring mission-essential functions don’t falter. 

While the IRA is providing some funding for the program, Spinrad said, it’s not one-for-one. He said he’s meeting with IOOS regional directors to understand what the reductions mean. “We’ve directed that data management [and] cyber infrastructure be the specific activity that is sustained,” he said.

Ross also told Spinrad she was concerned about staffing cuts at the National Weather Service, especially as the hurricane season “is predicted to be extremely active.” 

The fiscal year 2024 budget cut roughly 100 positions from the NWS, Ross said, adding that if the fiscal year 2025 budget doesn’t increase staffing to inflation levels, it “could increase the burden on an already strained workforce.” She asked Spinrad how an “austere” staffing budget would impact the service.

“Our ability to bring people on board is not where I want it to be,” Spinrad said, adding that the agency hired 1,700 people last year, but still needs to focus on retention. NWS Director Ken Graham, Spinrad noted, “is working aggressively to optimize the staffing plan” for weather forecast offices.

The post Tough budget decisions for NOAA in focus at House hearing appeared first on FedScoop.

TMF investments to the Departments of Education, Commerce and State total just under $50 million. 

The State Department received two investments: $18.2 million to increase diplomacy through generative AI and $13.1 million to transition its identity and access management systems to a zero-trust architecture model.

The AI investment is intended to “empower its widely dispersed team members to work more efficiently and improve access to enhanced information resources,” including diplomatic cables, media summaries and reports. On the zero trust investment, State said it is planning to expedite the creation of a comprehensive consolidated identity trust system, as well as centralizing workflows for the onboarding and offboarding process.

Clare Martorana, the federal CIO and TMF board chair, said in a statement that she’s “thrilled to see our catalytic funding stream powering the use of AI and improving security at the State Department.” 

State recently announced a chatbot for internal uses and revised its public AI use case inventory to remove nine items from the agency website. Additionally, the agency has started to encourage its workforce to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT. 

The Department of Education, meanwhile, is using a $5.9 million allocation to assist the Federal Student Aid office on a new StudentAid.gov feature called “My Activity” to centralize documents and data to track activities and status updates. The FSA is anticipating “a reduction in wait times and the need for customer care inquiries,” per the GSA release. 

Education also recently announced an RFI for cloud computing capabilities for the FSA office, a follow-on contract for its Next Generation Cloud. 

Finally, the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will put its $12 million TMF investment toward modernizing weather.gov through a redesign to “enhance information accessibility” and “establish a sustainable, mobile-first infrastructure.” NOAA reported plans to integrate translation capabilities for underserved communities’ benefit. 

The release noted that NOAA’s associated application programming interface “faces challenges, causing disruptions in accessing dependable weather information for the American public.”

Martorana said she was “equally excited about the TMF’s two other critical investments — with students getting more modern access to manage their education journeys and the public gaining access to life-saving weather information in an accessible manner for all.”

These investments come after a second appropriations package to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 threatened to claw back $100 million from the TMF. Both the GSA and the Office of Management and Budget have faced challenges in convincing lawmakers to meet funding levels proposed by the Biden administration.

Martorana recently called on Congress to fund the TMF, pointing to the funding vehicle as a way to improve service delivery for the public across the government.

The post New TMF investments boost agency projects in generative AI, digital service delivery, accessibility appeared first on FedScoop.

Speaking Wednesday at the Swish Data GIST summit, André Mendes said his department had achieved major operational efficiencies by moving the separate connections across to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s N-Wave network.

N-Wave is a scalable and secure network built using 10GB per second Wave Division Multiplexed fiber-optic links and is used to provide the agency with the capacity to carry out multiple functions including weather forecasting and research.

“At the Commerce building, with all the bureaus located in there when I came on board, we had 13 different internet connections, with different vendors,” Mendes said. “We migrated all of them to one of our providers – NOAA – which runs N-Wave, which is a fantastic network system because of their massive requirements from a supercomputing, data collection and satellite standpoint, and they took over the entire business.”

He added: “We no longer have negotiations, we no longer have lawyers meeting to look at this, we no longer have these ATOs, because they ATO’d the entire system and it’s done. Those are all things that you can do in terms of accelerating [the process].”

Mendes noted also that having one network service provider resulted in the additional benefit of having all telemetry in one location.

“This is remarkable in terms of what it brings to the table from an efficiency and transparency standpoint,” he said.

The post Commerce has reaped benefits from network consolidation, says CIO Andre Mendes appeared first on FedScoop.

Part of a two-month pilot providing spaceflight safety mission assurance to select spacecraft in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), the analysis supports satellite tracking, safety notifications, and anomaly detection and alerts.

OSC resides within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration within the Department of Commerce, which was given until 2024 to assume the Department of Defense‘s responsibility of coordinating increasingly congested commercial and civil satellite orbits around Earth in a 2018 presidential directive. The office contributed $850,000 to DOD for the award of space situational awareness (SSA) data analysis contracts to seven firms, via the Joint Task Force-Space Defense Commercial Office Operations (JCO) vehicle, enabling the pilot.

“The space traffic coordination pilot project contracts — combined with the approximately $3.1 million in contracts that the Department of Commerce let in the summer for data purchase — are designed to demonstrate commercial capabilities and to help the Office of Space Commerce team develop the structure and operational requirements for the future system,” a NOAA spokesperson told FedScoop.

OSC hopes the pilot will help determine the extent to which commercial SSA services can augment or replace DOD’s existing capabilities, ideally forming the core of the new system.

COMSPOC Corp.; ExoAnalytic Solutions; Kayhan Space; KBR; NorthStar Earth & Space, Inc.; Slingshot Aerospace; and the Space Data Association received contracts.

DOD already awarded five contracts for GEO space object tracking data in September that also support the pilot.

Members of the Space Data Association will gather feedback from commercial satellite operators on the usefulness of the SSA services provided. OSC will then compare results to determine the maturity of SSA services and inform its approach to low Earth orbit (LEO).

“This pilot project helps usher in a new phase in how government and commercial operators work together to coordinate activities on-orbit,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad in a statement. “NOAA looks forward to continued collaborations that safely enhance the economic and technical potential of the U.S. commercial space sector.”

The post Office of Space Commerce’s space traffic coordination pilot commences appeared first on FedScoop.

As part of a new cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), the federal agency will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to pilot Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) earth system modeling projects.

CRADAs allow agencies to share ideas, technical expertise, facilities, research materials and intellectual property with external partners but prohibit federal funding. This latest CRADA is one of several Microsoft has entered with NOAA and other departments including the Navy and Army in the last two years to optimize satellite management, access educational resources and improve natural disaster resilience.

“We are excited about the potential of partnering NOAA’s environmental intelligence with Microsoft’s cloud computing in hopes of amplifying NOAA’s ability to predict climate, weather and ocean changes,” said Administrator Rick Spinrad in the announcement.

NOAA hopes to improve models including those used to predict air quality, wildfire smoke and particulate pollution.

The CRADA also covers Microsoft tools for accelerating NOAA Fisheries’ collection, processing, storage and sharing of survey and observation data to improve its fisheries management. NOAA Fisheries plans to create a searchable catalog of ocean observations, including case studies of how they’re used to support public policy, safety, economic growth, environmental protection and climate resilience internationally.

NOAA also hopes to incorporate more external data sources into its weather modeling and forecasting system.

“We are honored to collaborate with NOAA to bring the power of cloud computing to help our nation’s leading scientists solve some of the important challenges facing the world,” said Rick Wagner, president of Microsoft Federal, in a statement. “Microsoft Azure Artificial Intelligence and high-performance computing capabilities can help NOAA accelerate critical research and foster innovative approaches to mitigate the risk of climate change.”

The post NOAA strikes climate modeling R&D agreement with Microsoft appeared first on FedScoop.

In a statement to FedScoop, spokesperson Cori B. Hughes said: “The Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization [office] coordinated efforts after a solid functional analysis to bring NOAA providers/clinicians onto the single common federal EHR currently used by VA, DOD, and the U.S. Coast Guard.”

She added: “There are 24 projected provider/clinicians that are USPHS officers located at 7 NOAA sites serving 300 officers and 400 divers. For NOAA, our Leidos Partnership for Defense Health will implement MHS GENESIS as a standard package. NOAA’s deployment is targeted for summer 2023.”

The Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization Office is charged with overseeing the rollout of the electronic health records system at the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Coast Guard and other federal agencies. Its director and deputy director report to the deputy secretary of Defense and the deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs.

NOAA is expected to implement the Oracle Cerner Millennium platform as part of the federal electronic health records modernization program (FEDHRM), which is intended to create a single, common health record for employees working at the DOD, VA, Coast Guard and other federal agencies.

In a separate statement to FedScoop, a NOAA spokesperson said: “The system meets the security requirements for NOAA uniformed service members’ health records, and integrates with the medical care system used by all uniformed service officers. No timeline for implementation is available at this stage.”

According to the NOAA spokesperson, the DOD’s instance of the electronic health records platform, MHS Genesis, will be deployed within its Office of Marine and Aviation Operations to manage health records for the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps.

Details of the NOAA system rollout come after the VA earlier this month announced that it would delay all future scheduled deployments of the Oracle Cerner electronic health record system at VA hospitals until June 2023.

NOAA has approximately 12,000 employees but only a few hundred of them are commissioned officers who would be affected by the adoption of MHS Genesis.

The DOD, VA and Coast Guard all deploy the same Oracle Cerner Millennium platform, however, each agency has a different name for the system. The DOD calls its health records system MHS GENESIS, while the VA simply calls it the Electronic Health Records Modernization Program.

The VA’s EHRM system has been plagued by outages, and has caused major harm to some veterans who did not receive treatment because records disappeared in the computer system. 

Concerns over the impact of the system on patient care have been expressed by frontline medical staff, lawmakers and oversight bodies. Earlier this year, the VA’s Office of Inspector General published a trio of reports that identified major concerns about care coordination, ticketing and medication management associated with the EHR program launch.

Meanwhile, MHS GENESIS has faced outages and issues of its own, but not with the same frequency and scale as the VA’s EHRM rollout problems.

The VA signed on for Oracle Cerner’s Millennium EHR platform in May 2018, while the DOD started using the platform in 2015 and is further ahead with its system implementation.

The Defense Department had completed over half of its scheduled rollout for MHS Genesis in June of this year, and expects to deploy the system on time by the end of 2023.

The VA referred FedScoop to the FEHRM when asked for comment.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect comment from the Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization Office.

Dave Nyczepir contributed to this report.

The post NOAA could start using Oracle Cerner EHR platform next summer appeared first on FedScoop.

NOAA’s procurement is a small business set-aside for the Fisheries Domain within its nearly $8 billion, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity Professional, Scientific and Technical Services 2.0 (ProTech 2.0) program.

ProTech 2.0 task orders will cover four domains — Satellite, Fisheries, Oceans and Weather — and dovetail off of its ProTech predecessor’s, which as of April numbered 230 awards worth $1.12 billion, almost half, of the contract’s $3 billion ceiling. NOAA wants Fisheries 2.0 Domain task orders to go to companies that will bolster the national environmental intelligence capability.

“In ten years our fishery management plans will implement a more flexible approach that focuses on ecosystem function and sustaining economically viable coastal communities, recognizing that species contributions will change with climate change,” reads a NOAA industry day presentation from April.

With a five-year base period and one, five-year option, ProTech 2.0 runs twice as long as ProTech to provide more stability and encourage long-term solutions, according to the presentation. 

ProTech 2.0 will continue to allow the practice of teaming on the fly, where prime awardees pursue any task order within their domain and add subcontractors as needed.

Bidders must be able to provide professional, scientific and technical experts across ProTech 2.0’s six task areas:

• studies, data analysis and reports; 
• applied research, engineering, consulting and operations; 
• filed sampling, data collection and surveys; 
• training and program and project management; 
• fisheries management and consultation activities; and
• economic and social science.

While not all task areas need to be addressed, it will “decrease confidence” if an offeror fails to demonstrate experience for each requirement within a contract element, according to NOAA’s response to draft request for proposals (RFP) feedback.

Offerors’ relevant experience should fall within the last five years and be greater than or similar to current ProTech Fisheries task orders, which run from $100,000 to $10 million.

Bids will be evaluated in two phases with offerors first providing an administrative volume with an executive summary; a five-page written submission outlining employee recruitment, practices and mission commitment; and a technical corporate capabilities self-assessment matrix. Top contenders will then be selected to submit full, written proposals and give oral presentations.

NOAA closed the Satellite 2.0 Domain RFP in January with an award expected in the first quarter of fiscal 2023. Drafts of the Oceans 2.0 Domain RFP and Weather 2.0 Domain RFP haven’t been released, but their awards are expected in the second quarter of fiscal 2024 and first quarter of fiscal 2025 respectively. 

The Fisheries 2.0 Domain procurement will consist of at least 10 and no more than 25 awards with on- and off-ramping throughout its lifespan. 

“The expected time of award for ProTech 2.0 Fisheries is September 2023,” reads NOAA’s response to feedback. “While we do not anticipate an overlap, should the need to [extend] current contracts arise, the ordering period for 2.0 contracts will begin at the end of the current period of performance.”

The post NOAA to seek Fisheries data technologies via $8B ProTech 2.0 contract appeared first on FedScoop.

NWS‘s Office of Water Prediction needs engineers, technicians, program and project managers, data scientists, and software developers to deliver three improved or innovative capabilities sought by the decade’s end: the National Water Model (NWM), flood inundation mapping (FIM) services and an enterprise hydrofabric solution.

A contract resulting from NOAA’s sources sought notice would cover development of a Next-Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework starting in 2025 with a testing environment for optimizing both the NWM and FIM. The framework would be updated annually.

Details of the new contract were published by the agency earlier this month in a performance work statement on SAM.gov.

The chosen contractor would also be expected to improve FIM services helping NOAA make flood emergency response decisions by improving the depiction of where, when and how infrastructure is impacted.

Lastly the contractor will establish an enterprise hydrofabric solution — a digital representation of significant water features on and below the land’s surface — supporting both the NWM and FIM. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which NWS is a part, is developing an earth system modeling framework to which all three capabilities are key and that will help with decision making.

“Over the last decade, NWS has taken proactive steps to transform and innovate its modeling capacity, as well as move into a partner and customer-centric service delivery model to create a climate-ready nation (CRN) that is prepared for and responds to weather, water and climate-dependent events,” reads NOAA’s performance work statement. “Building a CRN was identified by the secretary of Commerce as one of the top Department of Commerce priorities.”

The winning contractor will work out of its own facilities, and NOAA is interested in improving small business competition through this sources sought. Responses are due by 5 p.m. EDT on Sept. 8, 2022.

The post National Weather Service seeks IT expertise to develop next-gen water prediction capabilities appeared first on FedScoop.

The worst of the geomagnetic storm affecting Earth likely occurred Wednesday night, with only minor conditions since, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center on Friday.

SWPC is keeping agencies like NASA abreast of the storm, which may affect their satellites and communications over the next 24 hours, but expected moderate conditions at worst as of 10:11 a.m. EST.

Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s facility in Boulder, Colorado continue to analyze solar wind data coming in from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and provide agencies and industry with situational awareness.

“It’s almost like the Sun shoots a magnet out into space,” Bill Murtagh, SWPC program coordinator, told FedScoop.

Part of an eruption began impacting the Earth’s magnetic field Wednesday night, producing geomagnetic storm conditions at the G1, minor, and G2, moderate, levels on a scale that goes up to G5, extreme. The storm was expected to peak at the G3, strong, level but no longer.

Geomagnetic storms heat and expand the atmosphere, changing its density in a way that can throw satellites off their orbit, and they can also cause electrostatic discharge on spacecraft. SpaceX lost 40 Starlink satellites it launched in February due to geomagnetic activity that didn’t even reach the G1 level.

“We have good communication,” Murtagh added. “We get these alerts and warnings out not just to industry but anybody and everybody that owns satellites, so NASA for example, with near-Earth and deep-space satellites, would get this information.”

SWPC is a division of the National Weather Service that’s been keeping an eye on a small cluster of sunspots, three times the size of Earth, that’s been unusually active the last four to five days. Daily eruptions have caused coronal mass ejections, releases of a billion tons of plasmic gas and magnetic field.

It issues alerts to about 70,000 Product Subscription Service subscribers, including almost every major satellite company globally, to help them plan for geomagnetic storms.

While satellite companies don’t really share information on how the storms ultimately affect them, agencies like NASA do — though not immediately. Weeks to months of analysis are required to determine if an anomaly on a spacecraft was due to a geomagnetic storm or something else, and SWPC might not catch wind for six months after an event, Murtagh said.

The last time the Earth experienced a G5-level storm, Oct. 29, 2003, NASA eventually released a report revealing that about 50% to 60% of their satellite fleet had been affected to various degrees.

“When they feel the effects, we will typically hear about it afterward,” Murtagh said.

No agencies had reported being affected by the current geomagnetic storm as of Friday, and G2-level storms don’t typically produce “big” effects, he added. But SWPC can still extend its existing watch or announce a new one and issue alerts as the storm level changes.

Geomagnetic storms can also degrade communications because they cause changes in the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere satellite signals must pass through to reach Earth. That said, cell phones will remain unaffected because line-of-sight communications are resilient due to cell towers.

Airlines aren’t as lucky because planes rely on high-frequency communications when traveling over oceans, and those signals bounce off the ionosphere and are degraded by solar flares. The situation isn’t dangerous because airlines have redundancies built in, namely switching to satellite communications or linking to other aircraft, Murtagh said.

A final way geomagnetic storms affect Earth is with geomagnetically induced currents that can flow through good conductive material like salt water and certain soil. The currents can move through rock formations into power grids, and introducing a direct current into an alternating current network is “not a good thing,” Murtagh said.

In the case of a G3-level storm however, the situation is “mostly” manageable without risk of power outages, he added.

The Sun’s magnetic poles reverse every 11 years, leading to a solar cycle much like a hurricane season where sunspots emerge.

Generally there are one to two G5-level storms every solar cycle, although there were none last cycle. No G5 or even G4s have been seen so far this cycle, but the solar maximum, when the most sunspots appear, isn’t until 2024-25.

“We’re ramping up to the next maximum,” Murtagh said. “So we’re going to see an increase of activity.”

The post Geomagnetic storm expected to pass with minimal impact on agencies’ satellites, comms appeared first on FedScoop.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is exploring multi-factor authentication beyond its network as it looks to strengthen cybersecurity in accordance with the federal zero trust strategy, according to its chief information officer.

Zach Goldstein told FedScoop his agency already requires Common Access Cards (CACs) and personal identification numbers to authenticate to its network but continues to perform comparative analyses of multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions for applications and devices.

“We’re looking at things other than CAC cards, things that are intelligent tokens — that know who I am, that can exchange certificates with a certificate server, that can be easily revoked, that can have multiple kinds of privileges,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein added that cybersecurity is his “first priority,” in keeping with the White House’s Cybersecurity Executive Order issued in May 2021, and that he hopes to select a token for app and device authentication by the second quarter of fiscal 2023.

NOAA is also increasing supply chain risk assessments of Software as a Service — looking not only at the firm but what they buy and use for services — under Goldstein, who’s been with the agency 17-and-a-half years and CIO since 2015.

Goldstein wants to expand NOAA’s use of the cloud in a way that further improves the agency’s cyber posture while shedding light on how migration is progressing.

“We have an initiative to create a Cloud Program Management Office (PMO), one of whose jobs will be to provide me and NOAA leadership with that answer,” he said.

Assuming the funding for the office within the president’s fiscal 2023 budget stands, Goldstein hopes to launch it by the end of that fiscal year.

According to Goldstein, NOAA was the second federal agency to move its email and calendar to a public cloud, Google Apps for Government, in 2011, and since then the agency has migrated websites, help desk ticketing and global device management.

“It became very clear that we needed to have more discipline going to the cloud and more efficiencies because people were duplicating each other by having to learn how to do a security evaluation of going to the cloud, learn how to authenticate to the cloud, figure out how to communicate and get my data to the cloud,” Goldstein said. “And they were also using different contract vehicles.”

The CIO agreed to authorize NOAA offices’ migrations with the expectation that once his team implemented centralized cloud services streamlining and lowering the cost of the process, they’d use those instead.

NOAA now offers a standard way of getting to the cloud; authenticating using its identity, credential and access management (ICAM) service; and contracting with the three large service providers — Google, Amazon and Microsoft — and others. The Office of the CIO’s Cyber Division evaluates cloud offerings once for universal use across NOAA, accelerating offices’ migrations, but the Cloud PMO will make it so they don’t have to consult separate experts for each step in the process.

A Cloud PMO will also help offices take advantage of NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD), which allows for “extremely inexpensive” egress to the public, Goldstein said.

The White House proposed a large funding increase for the Office of Space Commerce in its fiscal 2023 budget, which if accepted by Congress would elevate it to a staff office receiving IT support from the OCIO. 

Goldstein expects to indirectly advise on, provide perimeter security for and oversee the cloud-native Open-Architecture Data Repository, which processes tracking data on space objects to predict and assess risk of collision. This information will improve space situational awareness for commercial and civil space operators. A requirements analysis is ongoing, so the operational cost hasn’t been calculated yet.

“Because the cloud is available and they know how to do it, we know how to do it — we’re going to help the Office of Space Commerce with this — they’ll be able to get that capability in the hands of the world faster,” Goldstein said.

The cloud is also freeing up NOAA’s IT professionals — previously stuck patching, scanning and performing domain controller work — to improve weather forecasting model accuracy and speed.

Supercomputing improvements that continue to be made by NOAA have increased capacity for forecasting three times over and should lead to 30% growth in research computing by the end of 2022, but research and development could benefit from even more, Goldstein said. The agency’s objective is to get enough capacity to perform all NOAA research, and enable focusing these applications down to what should be operationalized.

“We’re not there yet,” Goldstein said. “But we’re getting closer.”

The post NOAA evaluating multi-factor authentication for apps and devices appeared first on FedScoop.