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During 2002 Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., USN (Ret.) called for a fundamental review
of NOAA's strengths and opportunities for improvement. A Program Review Team reviewed and debated
issues and developed suggestions for building a better NOAA. These suggestions led to 68 specific
recommendations.
Recommendation 32 addressed centrally planning and integrating NOAA observing systems and indicated a clear need
for a NOAA-wide observing system architecture. The NOAA Administrator responded:
I concur with the PRT recommendation that NOAA
centrally plan and integrate all observing systems. I will assign this
responsibility to a matrix management team, with NESDIS providing the program
manager. I do not currently endorse the PRT recommendation to assign
acquisition authority for all observing systems to NESDIS.
NESDIS should lead a cross-cut team to
develop an observational architecture commencing immediately. This should
capitalize on on-going efforts (e.g., coastal observations). This architecture
should capture the state today as well as the future state (e.g., 10 to 20
years). With this architecture, NOAA would be able to assess current
capabilities and identify short-term actions.
A cross-cutting team led by NESDIS should
conduct a systemic review of all other observing systems. The following factors
should be considered for observing systems to determine the desirability of
consolidating them:
- The required characteristics of the system (i.e., reliability, performance, maintainability)
- The number of and types of users of the system
- The estimated value of the capital asset and its recurring maintenance cost
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