No mention in this press release of what it might actually accomplish. Meanwhile a full scale siting assessment and quality control analysis of the entire NWS COOP network remains undone. On the plus side, they won’t now be able to use the CRU excuse of “we are understaffed” to avoid the FOIA requests surely coming their way. h/t to Joe D’Aleo – Anthony
Contact: John Leslie FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
301-713-0214 Sept. 16, 2010
NOAA Awards Contract to Manage Climate Data Records
NOAA officials today announced that Global Science & Technology, Inc., of Greenbelt, Md., has been awarded a contract to help manage the agency’s satellite Climate Data Records (CDR) program, which is based at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
The contract has a one-year base period, with two one-year option periods. The total contract value is $10,307,788.80. The contract will enable Global Science & Technology to add up to 25 jobs at NCDC’s Asheville location.
Scientists use CDRs to detect, assess, model and predict climate change and variability. Decision-makers use this information to develop effective strategies to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change in their local communities.
Through this contract, Global Science & Technology, Inc. will provide management support of the CDR program, including project control and oversight services, system and product development, and customer and community outreach.
“Global Science & Technology, Inc. brings experience as an industry leader to the CDR program, which is developing some of the most important climate data products in the world,” said Scott Hausman, acting director of NOAA’s NCDC.
NOAA’s NCDC is the largest environmental data center in the world. NCDC data help the scientific community and policymakers assess global climate variability and trends. The work on this contract will support the suite of climate services that NOAA provides government, business and community leaders, so they can make informed decisions.
“This is a remarkable opportunity for the National Climatic Data Center and for western North Carolina to expand our climate research and create up to 25 new high-paying, stable jobs in our area,” said Rep. Heath Shuler. “NCDC is home to the world’s most impressive and comprehensive collection of climate data, and this is one more step forward in making our mountain region unsurpassed in climate research in America.”
Scientists, researchers and leaders in government and industry use monthly U.S. and global temperature reports from NCDC to help track trends and other changes in the world’s climate. These climate services have a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Visit us online or on Facebook.
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Ryan N. Maue says:
September 17, 2010 at 4:03 pm
“NOAA climate scientists and meteorologists do not have computer programming expertise necessary to deal with the insanely huge datasets being generated. Much of the money will likely be dumped into producing new fancy data portals, online GUIs, and those very pretty high-quality glossy-photo reports.
The job applications on GST website for Asheville have nothing to do with climate science but database management. This really is no different than a university lab hiring a computer PhD/geek to manage their data servers.
Fight another battle, not this one…”
Not so fast. It may be true that climate scientists and meteorologists do not have expertise in database management, but why would you imply that NOAA has no one with the expertise or could not hire computer geeks themselves? What have they been doing so far?
Billyquiz says:
September 17, 2010 at 9:21 am
http://www.directmet.com/green_philosophy.html
At our 2008 corporate retreat, GST decided to embrace a “green” philosophy to address our dependence on petroleum (as both a company and as individual employees) and the threat that global warming has to life on Earth.
Gatekeeping anyone?
A few more accurate terms would be: Conflict of interest, preconceived notions, foregone conclusions, and ‘ready-made solutions.’
Not only is it ‘worse than we thought,’ but it’s a calculated deception, if what you say is indeed true.
Ryan N. Maue says:
September 17, 2010 at 4:03 pm
NOAA climate scientists and meteorologists do not have computer programming expertise necessary to deal with the insanely huge datasets being generated. Much of the money will likely be dumped into producing new fancy data portals, online GUIs, and those very pretty high-quality glossy-photo reports.
The job applications on GST website for Asheville have nothing to do with climate science but database management. This really is no different than a university lab hiring a computer PhD/geek to manage their data servers.
Fight another battle, not this one…
Begging your pardon, Ryan, but isn’t it the NOAA scientists themselves who’ve actually written the code for their own ‘forecasting programs?’
And if not, then why have they —and others in the AGW/CC/WHATEVER IT IS TODAY community— insisted on not revealing the code, not releasing data, and just plain played hide-and-seek over the long haul in order to prevent a serious evaluation of their so-called ‘climate models?’
You protest too much, methinks …
Enneagram says:
September 17, 2010 at 9:21 am
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun
What do they define as “the surface of the sun”?
—-
Relevance?
An overview of GST’s 2009 contracts is here. They apparently do a lot of work for NOAA.
It’s the sun stupid.!
davidmhoffer says:
September 17, 2010 at 7:46 pm
I don’t know what gave the impression that NOAA is a company.
It’s an agency. NOAA dot gov runs on taxpayer dollars.
United States Department of Commerce.
They should not be selling that which we all paid for.
They also should not be hiring people or agencies in other countries to do the job we are already paying them to do.
Everything that NOAA has built or collected while being paid with our tax dollars belongs to the US.
So, when did the 4 sale sign go up, I missed it.
Will this non-government body even be bound by FOIA ?!
Here they use the term commercial in confidence, this stops FOI in its tracks and is an excuse to prevent parliament from examining contracts, and data. The product then is copyright and sold on a user pays principles.
You pay for the product, but only recourse is to sue if you can prove it is defective or not fit for purpose. Unless the company is protected (indemnified) by the government of the day looking after its mates.
I suggest this is the reason. Please press for effective oversight by government on behalf of the taxpayer (both the contracts and charges) US Senate?. Otherwise its the thin end of the wedge, power and control over knowledge and capable of protecting the spin and propaganda that is said to be based on that data.
Sad day in my view. Vigilance protects truth.
Glenn
It may be true that climate scientists and meteorologists do not have expertise in database management, but why would you imply that NOAA has no one with the expertise or could not hire computer geeks themselves?>>
I’ve been selling high performance compute environments to public and private research organizations for so long that my first deal involved less cpu power than a modern digital wrist watch. I can assure you that this is not the sort of thing that you just hire a few geeks for. There are very few organizations in the world that can do this sort of thing well at that kind of scale. If you check, you will find that everyone from Disney to BP to the CIA obtains this expertise from companies that specialize in it.
rbateman;
I don’t know what gave the impression that NOAA is a company.
It’s an agency. NOAA dot gov runs on taxpayer dollars.
United States Department of Commerce.
They should not be selling that which we all paid for.
They also should not be hiring people or agencies in other countries to do the job we are already paying them to do.>>
I never said they were a company, and they haven’t “sold” anything. And the supplier in question here is not in another country, they are in the U.S.
899;
Begging your pardon, Ryan, but isn’t it the NOAA scientists themselves who’ve actually written the code for their own ‘forecasting programs?>>
There is a massive difference between writing the code to analyze the data and managing the data itself. I bet you can use Excel, but could you write your own spreadsheet program from scratch? Even if you could, the amount of time it would take you would be rediculous when compared to the cost of buying Excel. Further, a researcher uses the technology that s/he is proficient in and which is suitable to the task. Another researcher might need completely different tools to analyze the same data for a different purpose. Should the researcher who only knows how to use Fortran and flat files drop what they are doing to figure out how to convert their data to NetCDF for someone else? If researchers whose expertise is in analysis, not data conversion, make an error in conversion, how much research will wind up as wasted money when the error is detected, or worse not detected and results tainted as a consequence?
This contract is no big deal, no stealthy conspiracy. It is a standard method used by public and private research organizations alike to acquire the expertise for tasks such as this from those who specialize in it. The scale required for NOAA’s data reduces the number of potential suppliers to very few world wide, it is not a common skill set. Having seen what happens when organizations think they can just hire a few geeks, I can attest that this is the road to disaster. I won’t name names, but the companies and organizations who have tried to do this kind of thing on their own and failed miserably would surprise you.
Thank you for calling NOAA Climactic Database technical support. Your call is important to us. All calls may be monitored and traced for quality assurance purposes. If you are a researcher who has published in a peer-reviewed NOAA-accepted scientific journal and have registered with NOAA, press 1. All others, please stay on the line until our next available representative can assist you. Our normal technical support hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between 8AM Eastern time and 5AM Pacific time.
I’m with davidmhoffer on this one. I, too, am in the IT business, and I’m familiar with the process of outsourcing data management functions.
For those who are making wisecracks about “$136K per job”, don’t assume that the contract value as stated is only about a few people. The cited contract value could also include hardware procurements for GST on behalf of NOAA.
Outsourcing is cheaper in the long run for a very simple reason: the Federal government finds it all but impossible to fire people. This came about from abuses long years ago, but there have now been so many restrictions written into the Federal code that once someone is on the government’s actual payroll, they can’t be gotten off, period. That also includes extremely generou (by today’s standards) pension and retirement benefits.
By contrast, contractor positions can be eliminated easily if the budget is cut or “department priorities are re-directed”. The government just tells the contractor: “Hey, guess what, you’re going to have to get rid of 5 of your people.” Or 20. Or 100. Or they can cut off the entire contract, no matter how big.
“This is a remarkable opportunity for the National Climatic Data Center and for western North Carolina to expand our climate research and create up to 25 new high-paying, stable jobs in our area,” said Rep. Heath Shuler.”
=========================
How will these “jobs” be paid for?
I assume they will just be added to our national debt.
“stable jobs” is a term that could only be uttered by someone with no business experience.
Or a government employee.
Lordy! Too many people on this site aren’t sceptics, they’re cynics.
For ages there has been complaining on WUWT that the climate scientists won’t use people with the proper expertise: programmers, statisticians, etc. We say some things should be done by people with proper training and experience, not some PhD who is self-taught.
Yet when the NOAA do actually hire someone expert in a field – a highly technical one – there’s endless bleating about it being a cover-up.
We complain vociferously about Phil Jones’s inability to reliably store and retrieve old data, yet slag NOAA for attempting to prevent the same problems.
And the whinging about copyright is even stupider: no-one gives over copyright in a situation like this. You don’t spend all that time and money collecting something, then pay someone else to get your copyright. GST are just storing the information. A library doesn’t get copyright because it owns a copy of a book!
It’s not even clear the NOAA database is copyright, because it is not creative, but a collection of facts: http://www.iusmentis.com/databases/us/ Certainly the raw data would struggle to be classified as “creative”.
The observation about this contract giving no extra legal immunity from FOI requests may well be true, but the observation that it’s easier for the government to fire contractors, and for contractors to fire their employees, means that whistleblowing is much less likely to occur. For example, the climategate email leak, had it occurred at a contractor, could easily have resulted in everyone under serious suspicion being fired, discouraging future leakers. Note also that when a contractor is fired, perhaps because he doesn’t like the way the data is being handled, he almost automatically becomes a “disgruntled former employee” who can be disregarded by “serious” media people everywhere. In short, the lack of job security leads to stronger and more potent groupthink and part of that groupthink will be pleasing the customer above almost all other concerns.
To ZZZ:
You wrote: ” In short, the lack of job security leads to stronger and more potent groupthink and part of that groupthink will be pleasing the customer above almost all other concerns.”
That’s part and parcel of the government contracting world, anyway. The way most government contracts are written is that they are “cost plus award fee”. This means that the contractor must in effect show the government their books–the “cost” part of the equation. Written into the contract is a set of criteria by which the contractor is nominally judged. Based on that judgment, the government will give an “award fee”. That’s the company’s profit. Pleasing the customer is how you get the award fees up toward the top of the scale.
Firm fixed-price contracts are relatively rare in the government contracting world.
To Chris R: I agree, and that may well be why NOAA wants to contract out its data handling. The more potent groupthink means that the data and what is really happening to it is less likely to be leaked in an embarrassing way. From NOAA’s point of view this is a major plus and from the skeptic’s point of view it is a minus, because now there is less likely to be another climategate-type of leak.
Once the original data is currupted or shredded, if such a likely event were to happen, would we have to start over? Might that be a way to end Global ‘whatever’? Does the CIA outsourse covert-ops? Does Treasury outsourse accounting? Does Defense outsource invasions and airstrikes? Is this an American company or a multi-national owned by Sornose&Co? Is it Global Climate that’s changing, or Global Politics? Hummmmm.. i wonder