Last Friday, October 9th several Ramble residents got a unique opportunity to tour the National Climatic and Data Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in downtown Asheville. NCDC archives 99 percent of all NOAA data, including over 320 million paper records; 2.5 million microfiche records; over 1.2 petabytes of digital data residing in a mass storage environment. NCDC has satellite weather images back to 1960 and annually publishes over 1.2 million copies of climate publications that are sent to individual users and 33,000 subscribers. The Center also maintains over 500 digital data sets, receives almost 2,000,000 requests each year, and records over 100 million hits per year on the website. The stored climate information and available analyzing reports are essential to industry, agriculture, science, agriculture, hydrology, transportation, recreation, and engineering. This information can mean tens of millions of dollars to concerned parties.
The federal building also hosts several other organizations, including the Education and Research Consortium of the Western Carolinas. This non-profit organization is creates the backbone of western North Carolina broadband and is working on bringing in more fiber optics to the area.
It was a great tour and many questions were asked to the employees of both organizations.
