National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service

Environmental Weather Satellites, two orbiting over the United States, one to show the eastern and the other the western portion of the country bring you the nightly images seen on your local weather forecasts. Polar-orbiting satellites add the perspective needed to give global and long-term climate forecasting. http://www.oso.noaa.gov

The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, combines NOAA, Department of Defense and NASA satellite operations in the Integrated Program Office. Operated by NOAA, NPOESS saves $1.8 billion in operational and acquisition costs: http://www.ipo.noaa.gov

The World's Largest Active Archive of Weather Data, the National Climatic Data Center, is located in Asheville, North Carolina. The center has more than 150 years of weather data and operates the World Data Center-A for Meteorology, adding more than 18 million pages of data each day: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov

Environmental Data Provide a View of the Physical World as it is and an interpreted history of how it was. The National Geophysical Data Center houses activities on the fields of solid earth geophysics, marine geology and geophysics, solar-terrestrial physics and paleoclimatology. These volumes of data record the scientific observations of the constantly changing character of the world: http://www.www.ngdc.noaa.gov

Oceanographic Data Providing a Record of Environmental Change on Earth are housed at the National Oceanographic Data Center. The center provides data products and services to scientists, engineers, resource managers, policy makers in the United States and around the world: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov

Licensing of Commercial Remote Sensing Systems is a function NOAA has provided since 1992. This follows the Administration policy on foreign access to remote sensing space capabilities. NOAA/NESDIS encourages consultation meetings with potential applicants before a license application is submitted. http://www.licensing.noaa.gov