Whoa there's allot of the free NOAA [resources]

Government Book Talk - Be a NOAA-it-all with these FREE NOAA resources about the weather and oceans

In the morning when I get on the elevator up to my office in GPO headquarters, when they aren’t talking about sports, everyone is chatting about the weather. My colleagues compare the day’s weather with previous years and talk about what’s coming in the days and seasons ahead. Since Washington, DC’s weather varies greatly throughout the year (even through the day!), people in this area are always taking the pulse of the outdoors and our world. In a similar vein, the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, the U.S. Government’s oldest scientific agency, is taking the pulse of the Earth, for our benefit.

You can be a NOAA-it-all with these FREE online resources

NOAA says that “Our reach goes from the surface of the sun to the depths of the ocean floor as we work to keep citizens informed of the changing environment around them.” As such, its mission is to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.

Once they’ve taken the Earth’s pulse, of course NOAA wants to share the output of their studies. The data the agency gathers when studying the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans is comprehensive, and it is a global leader in communicating how Earth’s atmosphere and water systems influence people’s lives and how they influence those systems. If you learn how to navigate the range of NOAA’s free online resources, including real-time and archived information, you will get the full benefit of this rich data.

NOAA educates and disseminates data from its many valuable services, including the National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Ocean Service, the National Weather Service and others. Their information comes packaged in videos, weather alerts, digital coastal charts, entire databases, atlases, podcasts, screensavers, sea sounds, field reports, tagging data, and an entire education Web site for teachers and kids. NOAA has resources for children that are as unique and valuable as their science.

Whether to Weather

For instance, NOAA’s Weather Systems and Patterns page has a multimedia, lessons and activities, real world data, background information and career profiles. A student who is interested in extreme weather can graph tornado air pressure in the lessons section, investigate the severe weather events page in the real world data, track a storm in the multimedia section, read the background on severe weather, and even flirt with future career possibilities in the career profile of the tornado chaser.

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NOAA Education Resources

Multimedia Gallery

WORLD OCEAN DATABASE 2013

World Ocean Database 2013 (WOD13) is an update of World Ocean Database 2009 (WOD09). All data are available online presorted by 10 ° geographic squares, by year or by user specified criteria.

This is the World Ocean Database with data and quality control flags exactly as used for the World Ocean Atlas 2013 climatologies. It is a preserved record of input data. The main World Ocean Database dataset builds on this record and includes updates and new data.

Note: The WOD13 has extended standard depth levels. The 40 standard depth levels used in previous versions of WOD are all among the 137 standard depth levels used in WOD13, to provide continuity.

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World Ocean Database and World Ocean Atlas Series

Hey, we're paying for it (at least those of us in the US) we might as well use what we can, right?