To address a growing need for remote access to high volume numerical weather prediction and global climate models and data, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), along with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), initiated the NOAA Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) project.
NOMADS enables the sharing and inter-comparing of model results and is a major collaborative effort, spanning multiple Government agencies and academic institutions.
To ensure that Agency and Institutional requirements are being met, the NOMADS collaborator's have established Science and Technical Advisory Panels.
These newly established panels would ensure the NOMADS system and metadata architecture could provide necessary inter-operability; and develop data archive requirement recommendations to NOAA.
The primary science benefit of the NOMADS framework is that it enables a feedback mechanism to tie Government and university research directly back to the NOAA operational communities, numerical weather prediction quality control and diagnostics processes at NCEP, and climate model assessments and inter-comparisons from around the world.