Pacific Region Integrated Data Enterprise (PRIDE)


In 2004, the Senate Appropriations Committee expressed concern about the significant increase in oceanographic and environmental data collection in Hawaii, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and the American Flag Territories of the Pacific and noted that NOAA has inadequate capacity to provide timely data and services to these areas. As such, NOAA conducted a survey of the region's oceanographic and environmental data requirements and identified gaps in existing services.

The NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC/Integrated Data and Environmental Applications (IDEA) Center was established in 2005 to address such needs and to identify and coordinate partnerships with other Federal and External Partners in the region.

With the passage of NOAA's appropriation for FY 2005, a new item was added to fund Pacific Region Integrated Data Enterprise (PRIDE) activity projects. At that time, the NOAA IDEA Center began supporting targeted short-duration data integration and visualization projects through the PRIDE program. Since FY 2005, a total of 37 projects have been funded.


The overarching goal of PRIDE is to advance NOAA's mission objectives and meet critical regional needs for ocean, climate, and ecosystem information to protect lives and property, support economic development and enhance the resilience of Pacific Island communities in the face of changing environmental conditions.

 



Eileen Shea
NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC/ IDEA Center
808-944-7253

Howard Diamond
NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC
301-713-1283

PRIDE projects support work in three thematic areas. These thematic areas also reflect the program element of the NOAA IDEA Center that support high priority regional and NOAA needs.

  • Climate/Weather and Coastal Communities: These activities focus on the development and provision of integrated information products designed to reduce the vulnerability of coastal communities to climate variability and support adaptation to climate change. This thematic area addresses issues related to changes in sea level on a variety of timescales including, but not limited to, storm surge and high wave events as well as inundation associated with long-term sea level rise as well as the implications of climate variability and change for water resource management and key economic sectors such as tourism and agriculture.

  • Marine and Coastal Ecosystems: These activities focus on the creation of products to support the emergence of an effective Pacific marine ecosystem management program and address the consequences of changing environmental conditions for Pacific coastal communities and economic sectors dependent on healthy coastal and marine ecosystems, most notably fisheries and tourism. One specific focus of work in this thematic area would be combining scaled down model outputs by coupling that tailored model output with biological and geochemical data sets to create new ocean ecosystem data products;

  • Risk Management/Hazard Resilience: These activities support the provision of new data sets illuminating past, current, and future trends in patterns of climate and weather-related extreme events such as tropical cyclones, flooding, drought, and ocean temperature extremes as well as the implications of those extreme events for key sectors of the economy such as agriculture, tourism, and fisheries. Such applications are not only immediately applicable to the Pacific region, but techniques and resulting integrated data products and services can be extended to other coastal areas.