To broaden access to NOAA’s vast collections of environmental data, NCEI has upgraded its universal web portal. Based on user feedback and professional usability reviews, OneStop 2.1 provides a refreshed look and feel with new features to enhance the search experience. 

The portal gives access to nearly 35,000 collections and millions of individual records spanning geophysical, ocean, coastal, weather, and climate data. OneStop also features multimedia previews and direct data downloads, when available. It establishes an additional online access point to expand usage of NOAA’s data. 

OneStop expands NCEI’s current avenues to environmental information, accessed by hundreds of thousands of existing users. It establishes an additional online access point to expand usage of NOAA’s data. The objectives are to provide easier data discovery, greater access, and visually appealing services that meet user expectations.

Features of NOAA OneStop

OneStop is designed to expand the number of potential users with an experience tailored to their needs, utilizing NOAA’s vast collection of environmental datasets. OneStop does not replace other web portals for NOAA data but creates a user-oriented point of access. Government, academic, and private sectors rely on NCEI data for a variety of needs related to public and commercial pursuits.

One major feature of the 2.1 upgrade is a shopping cart feature that allows users to select multiple files and download them for further analysis and use. Also included in the latest release is improved support for multimedia, such as video files.

Every collection in the NCEI archive with a metadata record is searchable in OneStop. Presently, NCEI archives a wide variety of Earth, ocean, geophysical, natural hazards, and space observations. OneStop provides access to weather, climate, satellite, fisheries, coastal, geomagnetic, and ocean data. Over the coming years, NOAA will develop the ability to make data in the current NOAA Data Catalog available as well.

OneStop was initiated in 2015 and launched in late 2017 as one of NOAA’s responses to the 2013 executive order to make public data more accessible and adhere to the tenets of the Open Government Program.