Environmental Data

Major Effort Is Needed to Improve NOAA's Data Management and Archiving Gao ID: IMTEC-91-11 November 20, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO assessed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) management, storage, and archiving of environmental data collected by space and ground data collection systems.

GAO found that: (1) NOAA did not properly manage, store, or maintain its magnetic tapes, films, and paper records with valuable environmental data; (2) NOAA did not perform an agencywide census or inventory of its data and did not know how many or what data it had and where data were located; (3) poor management of magnetic tapes and film could cause partial or total loss of recorded data, and NOAA noted that some data were already lost and damaged; (4) 22 of the 35 vaults storing over 200,000 of the 440,000 tapes and 370 million film records did not comply with more than half of federal regulations and industry tape management guidelines; (5) each data center facility operated at least one film or tape storage vault which met some of the National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) regulations; (6) USGS and NOAA did not give adequate attention and support to managing and archiving environmental data; and (7) NOAA and USGS took immediate actions and planned long-term actions to correct the data management problems.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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