NOAA announced the release of a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to review the capability and feasibility of deploying advanced technologies to expand the discovery, access, and use of environmental intelligence for the purposes of social environmental equity and enhancing weather and climate resilience.
NOAA is undertaking this study after recognizing the need to improve and expand use, reproducibility, and trust in its systems and information to inform weather and climate decision-making. This BAA represents, in part, a follow-on to the Earth Observation Digital Twin BAA released in September 2022.
The BAA is intended to examine, deliver, and demonstrate working models, features, and capabilities related to the development and management of an enterprise information processing system. This system would be backed by an interoperable knowledge graph ecosystem, or “knowledge mesh,” of process contextualized, semantically enabled facts. The system would use the knowledge mesh for the purpose of answering highly contextual queries from a number of personas representing a diverse swath of NOAA users.
The study that will result from this BAA is part of NOAA’s System Architecture and Engineering office (SAE) Joint Venture Partnership. Joint Venture Partnership examines the feasibility of partnering with other federal agencies, the academic community, or the commercial sector to develop promising innovative research and technology to meet NOAA’s future observational, product and service needs.
The BAAs will be posted on the federal contracts opportunities website: SAM.gov. Following the release of the BAAs there will be a Community Day in late summer for all interested parties as announced in the BAA. Based on the responses to the BAAs, NOAA will choose the best options to pursue.