01 · The challenge
World-class data, hard to find.
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information holds one of the largest environmental data archives in the world, and it set out to make that data useful to weather-exposed industries such as architecture and engineering, insurance and reinsurance, and retail and supply chain. The barrier wasn’t a lack of data or products. The people who needed them couldn’t find them, couldn’t tell which one fit their decision and had little reason to trust them once found. Each product had its own navigation and conventions, documentation explained what a product contained but not who it was for, and launches faded quickly. Long federal review cycles and multi-organization approvals made every deliverable harder to move.
