Appendix B:
Statement of Task
The ad hoc committee charged to conduct this study will assist NOAA as it develops plans to meet its data archiving and data access requirements. The committee will first produce a letter report that includes a preliminary list of principles and guidelines that NOAA can use to begin planning specific archiving strategies for the data streams it currently collects. This preliminary set of principles and guidelines for data archiving will be refined and expanded in a final report that also addresses the extent to which a wide variety of data sets should be made available. The final committee report will also include specific examples of how these principles and guidelines could be applied to existing and planned data streams across NOAA. In summary, the committee will:
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Consider the existing and planned observational and derived data streams collected by NOAA, along with current data management procedures, in the context of existing NOAA legal requirements.
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Consider the relative costs of preserving and providing access to certain types of derived data products versus regenerating these data from archived first-stream input.
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Develop a list of principles and guidelines regarding what types of data should be archived indefinitely (for at least 75 years), and what types of data could be stored for shorter durations under budgetary constraints.
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Develop a list of principles and guidelines on how best to provide access to different variables, data sets and derived products, illustrated with a limited set of examples and case studies.