Last Updated: May 3, 1994 _________________________________________________________________________ Environmental Monitoring and the NII DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENT PART I: What Is the Application Arena? Description of Environmental Monitoring Environmental monitoring is fundamental to our ability to understand and predict changes in the environment, and to respond to the range of environmental issues facing the Nation today. It starts with the multitude of systems for space-borne, airborne, land-based, and ocean-based observations of physical, chemical, and biological characteristics and extends to dissemination of such information for safeguarding public health, life, property, and our Nation's natural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely essential for supporting the range of human endeavor, including transportation, commerce, education, and day-to-day activities. It encompasses phenomena both natural and man-made that occur on scales from seconds to millennia and from local to global. Just as we monitor financial, labor, and other indicators of economic health, so must we monitor environmental indicators to judge the state of the environment. Environmental monitoring tells us how well we are conserving biodiversity, how our activities are impacting the planet, and how to plan for and assess environmental remediation actions. Our national capability to perform comprehensive environmental monitoring is currently limited by an infrastructure that is extremely fragmented and which will not allow the kinds of capabilities envisioned for a multi disciplinary and global view of the environment. An improved NII will be a critical link in supporting the process of environmental observation, analysis, and information dissemination. The Vision: Develop a nationally integrated network of observing systems, computational centers, archives, libraries and information dissemination systems to address the Nation's needs for environmental data and information. Such an infrastructure will serve as an enabling integrating agent for the diversity of observational data and information by building upon the national investment (both public and private) in environmental monitoring and protection activities. Historically, environmental monitoring has been limited by our lack of understanding of the "interrelatedness" of environmental factors and the technological capability to make detailed, comprehensive environmental measurements, and then to integrate and interpret them in support of a host of scientific, policy, and operational uses. Consider the following scenario. The supertanker EXXON Valdez runs aground in the Gulf of Alaska. Authorities are informed of the mishap and an oil spill emergency management team is called into action to assess the situation. They call for an aerial reconnaissance of the region requesting that the airplane observations be distributed in real-time to a team of environmental experts located in various cities in the U.S. The experts determine that, based upon the rate of spillage and spread of the oil, a major environmental disaster is in the making. The emergency management team swings into action. It assembles a panel of experts (including fisheries and wildlife biologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists) through video teleconferencing. Within minutes it determines via on-line databases the resources available in the local area to combat the oil spill including ships, personnel, and appropriate equipment. Because of the remoteness of the spill region and its areal extent, it becomes clear that satellite imaging will be essential to monitoring the situation on a broad scale, to guide the local aerial and ship reconnaissance, and to support the spill containment operations. Invoking emergency authority, the team issues a direct request to an environmental satellite to adjust its imaging schedule so as to increase the rate of data taking over the site from once per day to once every orbital over pass. The team of scientific experts utilizes advanced high-resolution numerical models, accessible remotely at supercomputing centers, to predict the likely path of the oil spill so that spill containment and clean-up operations can be focussed to minimize environmental damage. Real-time observations of winds and ocean currents are fed to models to guide their output. The expert team accesses a remote, nationally distributed database containing the national biological inventory to determine the locations and populations of local fish spawning areas and wildlife habitats and to plan for appropriate safeguarding actions. The experts team devises a program of long-term monitoring to track the effects of the oil spill on the region and to assess environmental recovery. Economic models running at remote computational centers are invoked by the experts to assess the potential short-term and long-term economic impacts of fisheries degradation. Thanks to easy and timely access to real-time and historical observational data, advanced computational facilities, on-line databases, communications networks to link observing systems to emergency managers and analysts, resources have been effectively marshalled just in time to avoid serious, long-term damage to the area's environment and economy. Such a scenario for dealing with a potential environmental disaster is technologically feasible today, but requires overcoming a set of non-technological barriers that limit the implementation of such a decision-support system. Studies of the environment were once limited in scope to studying small regions and specific phenomena, generally in isolation from others. From the 1960s to the present, certainly our perception of the interrelatedness of environmental phenomena has changed. Equally as important, our capacity to make ever more accurate and precise regional and global measurements of the environment has expanded geometrically, particularly with the advent of advanced satellite-borne sensors as well as improved airborne, ground-based, and ocean-based instrumentation. However, our ability to fully utilize these measurements in support of decision making still lags behind our ability to make the measurements. A major cause of this lag is our inability until now to cope with the avalanche of data emanating from widely diverse systems, stored and disseminated in varied formats, and acquired in support of different agency or organizational missions. Technological solutions exist now that will allow acquisition of large volumes of disparate data, transmitting them to users, storing them in large capacity storage devices, retrieving them from databases, and manipulating them for analysis and decision support. Environmental monitoring is primarily a federal responsibility although state and local governments also play a significant role. For example, all levels of government and the private sector participate in water resources monitoring for a total investment of several billions of dollars annually across hundreds of organizations. Federal agencies having major programs in the environmental monitoring arena include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Energy (DoE), Department of the Interior (DoI), and Department of Defense (DoD). The roles of these agencies are extremely diverse, yet complementary. Examples of the functions performed by these agencies are: daily weather forecasts and severe storm prediction (NOAA), space-based atmosphere/ocean/land science research (NASA), fossil fuel-generated pollution monitoring and assessment (EPA), nuclear dump monitoring and nuclear power plant radiation release mitigation (DoE), characterization of the Nation's earth and water resources and public lands management (DoI), global weather and ocean prediction in support of national security operations (DoD). The national investment in observing systems, computational systems, and telecommunications systems to support the environmental monitoring activities of the various federal agencies over the next decade runs well into the tens of billions of dollars and includes such programs as NOAA's Weather Service Modernization, NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Mission to Planet Earth suite of environmental satellites, USGS investment in ground water observation wells and stream gaging stations, the National Biological Survey's "Gap Analysis Project," and EPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP). Many of modern-day environmental issues raise fundamental questions regarding sustainable development, i.e., our capacity to maintain economic growth while preserving environmental quality. To address the range of questions requires the analysis of a vast array of information derived from globally distributed observing systems (including earth-based, airborne, ocean-based, and satellite-borne) as well as historical environmental observations and analyses contained in hundreds of disparate and geographically distributed databases and libraries. To provide the best possible decision support, whether it be to assess effects of ozone depletion, issuance of severe weather warnings, response to oil spills, or other natural or man-made phenomena, requires access both to real-time as well as to historical data and information. Advanced modeling and predictive tools, and data visualization capabilities are needed. Effective and timely environmental monitoring requires a mechanism to integrate the array of observations and analyses and to provide the means by which those needing environmental information (including scientists, policy makers, educators, the general public, etc.) are provided with the best possible information in the most timely way. A number of barriers exist today that prevent us from fully realizing the capability to monitor the environment in a comprehensive way and to bring the information to those who can benefit. To foster the conditions under which the national investment in technology and personnel is translated into significantly improved environmental understanding and emergency preparedness requires that a number of issues be resolved to make effective use of an advanced NII as an enabling and integrating agent for environmental monitoring and as a means by which all segments of society derive maximum benefit. What is the Public Interest in Promoting the Application? Environmental information is key to a broad range of individual and societal endeavors and, therefore, is a logical application for the NII. An advanced NII will be an enabler of activities that depend on environmental information including: Economy and National Competitiveness Businesses require environmental information to make critical decisions that directly affect their productivity and overall competitiveness. For example: - Agricultural companies and small farming concerns require assessments of economic impacts of floods, droughts, insect infestation, and plant disease. They require environmental information to plan for planting and harvesting and to assess market needs. - The construction industry requires ongoing assessment of regional and local environmental parameters for construction codes (e.g., to withstand earthquakes and severe winds), insulation standards, flood plain boundaries, etc. - Retailers require environmental information for targeting product sales for specific local climatic conditions and for timing the shipment of seasonal products for particular markets. - The legal profession requires environmental information to arbitrate issues of culpability and liability as, for example, in the case of Hurricane Andrew property damage in South Florida. - The insurance industry requires information to set insurance rates and to assess risks due to potential floods, earthquakes, proximity of property to hazardous materials sites, and severe storms. - Electric power utilities use environmental information to site and design power plants, to plan for fuel consumption, and to anticipate power outages initiated by solar activity, severe storms or geologic activity. - Consultants and other private sector companies use environmental information to develop value-added information products targeted at specific industry needs (e.g., weather and crop health information is used by consultants to advise commodities traders). Environmental Change Assessment It is generally recognized by the scientific community that the range of man's activities is leading to significant change in regional and global environments and, in particular, on climate. Cultural causes of environmental change include deforestation, burning of fossil fuels, and urbanization. Environmental change also results from natural causes such as volcanic activity and solar activity variations. Environmental information and the ability to accurately monitor changes over time are critical to tracking changes in biological diversity, and hence, to monitoring the health of the planet. An advanced NII can enable better and earlier assessment of trends in the earth's environment by enabling the integration of real-time observations from the myriad of observing systems and from the historical record contained in archive databases. It can enable the integration of environmental data with human dimension data to assess the effect of demographics on the environment and of the environment on demographics. Transportation The integration of environmental information on the NII will support the nation's transportation systems for both commercial as well as non-commercial uses. Air traffic can receive timely and more comprehensive information, marine navigation can have the latest information on hazards to navigation and on waves and currents, the trucking industry can plan deliveries around traffic delays caused by inclement weather, the general public can better factor weather into local and distant travel plans. Emergency Preparedness and Environmental Disaster Mitigation The integration of environmental information from a wide range of sources and its ready dissemination via the NII can allow emergency managers to access the most up-to-date and comprehensive environmental information to support rapid decision-making and contingency planning in the event of an environmental disaster. For example, in the event of toxic gas or radiation release, emergency managers could access the latest satellite observations to analyze the extent of the problem or real-time, ground-based wind measurements as well as historical wind information to assess the likelihood of such emissions reaching a designated area. Plans for evacuation, best route for evacuation, or other mitigation steps can be planned based upon such information. Support for this critical application mandates that the NII be robust, and be able to support a wide range of disaster situations. The expanding use of wireless technology can be expected to address this requirement. Environmental Hazards Regulation and Remediation Many thousands of sites exist in the U.S. (and many more world-wide) that contain hazardous byproducts of industrial and military activity. Many are known; many are yet to be discovered. These include dumpsites of toxic chemical and nuclear, waste most of which are on land, but a number are also known to exist at sea. Pollution standards and clean water standards are codified in federal law and are the responsibility of the federal government to monitor and enforce compliance. The NII can provide the means by which regulatory authorities, including elements of DoE and EPA, have ongoing capability to discover previously unknown waste sites, to monitor known ones, to enforce compliance with clean air and water statutes, to plan remedial action to combat pollution, and to assess the success or failure of remediation activities. This will necessitate practical, appropriate linkages among federal, state, and local authorities using the NII. Education Environmental information from many sources can be integrated via the NII and used to bolster the Nation's science and technology education. School teachers as well as students can be given access to both real-time and historical data to explore real-world natural phenomena. The government's volumes of science and technology information can provide excellent source material for teachers to build lesson plans, to become more knowledgeable in a particular subject area, and to develop materials for class presentation. Likewise, an ability to monitor natural phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and severe storm events in a class room environment as they happen can form an invaluable experiential learning tool. The following application is proposed as part of the Vice President's Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program. The participation of school children across the globe can be incorporated in a real scientific experiment. Schools will be issued devices such as the commonly available personal digital assistants (PDAs). They will be asked to take periodic environmental measurements such as air temperature and then to transmit the readings to a central repository using their PDA. The information will be incorporated in a scientific analysis with feedback of results provided electronically. Natural Resource Management Effective policy making with regard to natural resource utilization and its impacts on our economy and the economies of other nations depends upon natural resource utilization planning, and assessments of the effects of utilization on regional and global environments. Quality of life considerations require ongoing cognizance of natural resource inventories and the impacts of utilization. For example, a major environmental concern today is the effect of deforestation, and particularly loss of the earth's tropical rain forests, on regional and global climate. Such potential environmental change has immeasurable impacts on economic and global habitability considerations. The NII has the potential to bring together widely diverse information from environmental observing systems and historical information repositories that, when integrated, provide the guidance needed to manage such natural resources and to predict deleterious effects. How Do We Know Whether We Have Succeeded? The positive effects of the NII environmental monitoring applications will be measured in ways we cannot fully predict at this time. However, the evidence of our success will be apparent over time and will be measured in terms of: - Reduction in time to assemble environmental information for emergency action in the event of natural or man-made environmental disaster. - Ability to locate and retrieve comprehensive, up to date, critical data for economic analysis and environmental policy considerations. - Improvement in the quality of environmental research results attributable to easy access to multiple agency databases. - Enhancement in executing the government's regulatory role in pollution control and natural resource utilization. Better, more reliable information and access to such information by analysts, scientists, policymakers and the general public will put an end to the perceived conflict between the economy and the environment; the Nation will get more results for its enormous annual investment in environmental observation and protection. PART II: Where Are We Now? Environmental monitoring is an activity that is primarily the purview of the federal government. However, significant participation exists in academia and private industry in the form of research to advance environmental understanding, to develop the technologies for observing the environment, and to provide value-added information products. Even with the limitations of today's information infrastructure, there are some good examples of the power inherent in environmental collection and dissemination. For example, the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act of 1986 established a Toxic Chemical Release Inventory, which requires industries to report their estimated total releases of toxic chemicals into the environment. Able to access the information via an innovative online service called RTK Net, citizens were able to point to the harms and urge polluting companies to reduce their emissions. Based on public pressure and their own concern about the quantities released, many companies voluntarily committed to making major reductions, even though no regulation mandated reductions. This demonstrates how publicly-assessable and usable environmental can wield tremendous power, both in the economic marketplace and the marketplace of public opinion. Federal agencies with major activities in this arena include (but are not limited to) NOAA, NASA, DoI, DoE, EPA, DoD, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Some existing federal programs and interagency activities provide both the impetus to move forward and a base of experience in interagency cooperation in the environmental arena. Some Major Interagency Efforts U.S. Global Change Research Program The USGCRP is a multi-billion dollar federal program that involves most of the U.S. agencies with environmental programs as well as some that do not. It also includes academia and private sector. This program consists of research activities that involve deployment of a number new environmental observing systems including the EOS satellites (scheduled for launch beginning in 1998), implementation of networks and data processing centers to support data acquisition and distribution, and a range of scholarly research. The networking part of this program is embodied in the Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS), which is intended to provide the appropriate level of communications technology, interoperability, and connectivity to allow easy exchange of data among participating agencies. Global Change Data and Information System The U.S. Global Change Data and Information Management Plan, a Report by the Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences approved in 1992, commits the participating Federal agencies to work with each other, with academia, and with the international community to make it as easy as possible for researchers and others to access and use global change data and information. Toward this end, the agencies are organizing a Global Change Data and Information System, which takes advantage of the mission resources and responsibilities of each agency. The GCDIS is described as the set of individual agency data and information systems supplemented by a layer of crosscutting new infrastructure, and made interoperable by use of standards, common approaches, technology sharing, and data policy coordination. Current plans call for the development of network interconnectivity, interagency data gateways, adoption of common standards for data exchange, and the establishment of procedures and policies for data and information dissemination among the participating agencies. As a decentralized system, the primary focus of the GCDIS is on establishing and maintaining effective mechanisms that integrate the disparate elements. National Spatial Data Infrastructure The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), established by OMB Circular A-16, has as its goal the creation of a national digital geographic information resource. The importance of this committee has significantly increased under the chairmanship of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and implementation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) by Executive Order is anticipated. The FGDC has taken a lead role in the development of data exchange and metadata standards needed to implement the NSDI. The scope of the NSDI includes all types of geographic information system (GIS) data from mapping and charting to all geographic or "spatial" data including climatic, demographic, natural resource, oceanographic, and geophysical data. High Performance Computing and Communications Program The U.S. federal HPCC program is a major multi-billion dollar interagency activity designed to promote the development of technologies and applications in high-performance computing and in telecommunications. Several agencies with major environmental programs are players in this program. A major element of the Program is the development of the National Research and Education Network (NREN), which would expand current Internet capabilities with a much higher capacity network. In 1993 a major new element, referred to as Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) was incorporated in the program to advance the use HPCC technologies in the development of the NII. Environmental Monitoring is one of approximately eight applications that define and establish technical requirements for implementing advanced telecommunications systems and services under IITA. The NII is seen as an integrating element and facilitator in Environmental Monitoring applications; that is, it promises to provide the transport mechanism and the data translation services to allow the user to work with many heterogeneous databases that are geographically dispersed. Federal Agency Activities National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA has mission responsibility to predict the weather, chart the seas, assess natural and man-induced climate change, manage U.S. fisheries, and perform environmental research to advance capabilities in these areas. NOAA is a major participant in the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), within which it performs basic ocean and atmospheric science research as well as conducting research in a variety of environmental areas within its laboratories. It also participates in major international and interagency environmental research activities including the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOE), Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), and the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Continental-Scale International Project (GCIP). In carrying out its mission, the agency operates a variety of observing systems including environmental satellites, doppler weather radar, ground-based weather sensors, ocean-going fleet, ocean-based instruments, etc.; telecommunications facilities have been established to support the acquisition of data from these observing systems for operational use. The agency operates three National Data Centers (National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanographic Data Center, and the National Geophysical Data Center) charged with maintaining the nation's climate, ocean, and other earth science records and distributing environmental information in support of commerce, transportation, construction, education, research, etc. NOAA's High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program has been established to coordinate the agency's needs for and development of high performance computation in support of mission objectives and the fundamental telecommunications infrastructure for environmental information acquisition and dissemination internally and with the outside. NOAA's Environmental Service Data and Information Management (ESDIM) Program provides coordination within the agency and with outside organizations (including federal, international and academic institutions) in matters of environmental information management, including environmental information product generation, distribution, and standards; data policy considerations; and interagency and international agreements on environmental data exchange. National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA has mission responsibility to conduct space-based research in atmospheric, ocean, and land science and the development of satellite-borne sensors to accomplish this research. In support of this mission, NASA has long been involved in the development of information systems to acquire the data from these sensors, manage it, and convey the data to its researchers. It is currently involved in several major interagency and international environmental research programs including USGCRP and GCIP. NASA has undertaken an ambitious program to launch a series of earth observing satellites beginning in 1998 referred to as the Earth Observing System (EOS). These satellites will measure a variety of atmospheric, ocean, and land parameters over a period of 15 years to arrive at a better and more comprehensive understanding of earth processes. In particular, the measurements will attempt to provide answers to fundamental questions about how the earth's environment is changing. An equally ambitious program of data management, called the EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS), has been established to develop the systems to acquire, manage, and disseminate the environmental data from the satellites. A set of eight Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAAC) have been established by NASA along scientific discipline lines to receive the data, generate information products, and distribute them to NASA's research community. These DAACs will be interconnected via a high-bandwidth telecommunications infrastructure called the NASA Science Internet (NSI) to enable data exchange among the DAACs. NASA has initiated a program on Public Use of Earth and Space Science Data Over the Internet by developing pilot end-user remote sensing database applications and applying new digital library technologies that can enable and demonstrate the application and accessibility of earth and space science databases. Remote sensing database applications potential areas of interest include: atmospheric, oceanic, and land monitoring; publishing; agriculture; forestry; transportation; aquaculture; mineral exploration; land-use planning; libraries; cartography; education (especially K-12); entertainment; environmental hazards monitoring; and space science data applications. Potential Digital Library technologies include: innovative user interfaces; direct public access to satellite imagery; heterogeneous databases; information retrieval; advanced search and browse techniques; data structures; use of data and image compression; distributed database systems; accounting and data security; file storage management systems; and resource discovery. Environmental Protection Agency EPA is responsible, through its research and regulatory authorities, for protecting public health and ecological resources from environmental pollution. Environmental monitoring is an essential tool in the development and evaluation of policies intended to protect human and ecological health. The use of environmental monitoring data allow EPA offices and their partners to better estimate the risks associated with pollution in the environment and to more effectively manage these risks. Specifically, EPA's environmental monitoring and research activities relate to the development and field evaluation of models that: 1) estimate concentrations of pollutants in the environment based on source information and 2) evaluate the risks posed by these pollutants to human and ecological health. These efforts are supported by programs that develop methods and technologies for measuring pollutants in the environment and approaches for assuring the quality of monitoring data. EPA also monitors pollutant concentration and indicators of human health and ecological condition as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of its policies and regulatory decisions. These efforts include: 1) several Clean Air Act-mandated programs to monitor concentrations of the major ambient air pollutants and their sources; 2) monitoring of water supplies and discharges into lakes and rivers mandated under the Clean Water Act; 3) the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP), a national scale program to monitor ecological resources; and 4) the National Human Exposure Assessment Survey (NHEXAS). EPA's environmental monitoring programs allow the agency to continuously evaluate and improve its regulations, decisions, and policies, by ensuring that all relevant scientific and technology information is considered in their development. EPA provides information and data to the public and other interested stakeholders through a variety of means: public information centers, limited mainframe access, electronic bulletin boards, hotlines and clearinghouses. Key environmental systems that are of interest and importance to the public and businesses are available such as the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Also, the Center for Environmental Research Information is the focal point for the exchange of scientific and technical environmental information produced by EPA. Department of Energy DoE has mission responsibility to provide an environmentally safe, economically sound, and politically stable energy future. It conducts focussed scientific research involving the carbon cycle including research on the effects of fossil-fuel emissions on the earth's biosphere. To support its research efforts and its data dissemination, DOE has established the ESnet wide area network connecting 23 sites and with links to the Internet. DoE has significant expertise and experience in using computing and information technology to support its efforts in environmental cleanup. Databases currently exist for classification of waste streams and waste tank status and condition. DoE is pioneering the effort to develop and use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the process of monitoring and managing environmental remediation. The agency is a leader in the development and use of modeling and simulation technology for modeling groundwater flow and evaluating the effectiveness of remediation technology. DoE also has developed leading edge technology in robotics and teleoperated systems. DoE's overall objective is to leverage the large, ongoing investment made by industry and other government agencies in the successful implementation of the NII dedicated to enhancing the quality of our environment. Both managing and remediating existing waste sources and reducing waste from U.S. manufacturing operations through universal access to best practices information are critical. DoE will apply its information infrastructure resources to ensure that an information structure is developed and implemented providing significant utility to all enterprises in the Environmental Restoration Industry to enhance their productivity and competitiveness by: - Reducing the time required for the industry to identify, characterize, assess, recommend and remediate environmental issues - Providing and enhancing the access for all environmental industry enterprises to the intimidating amount of regulatory information in a timely manner - Ensuring high performance access to resources, especially monitoring and modeling resources, to validate remediation plans. DoE makes environmental information available through three major centers: the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). CDIAC is focussed on deriving information for global change analysis and is the nation's primary steward of information on greenhouse gases. EIA has data collection and analysis authority for total fuel cycle especially for benefit-cost analysis of environmental impacts. The data holdings are a resource for energy production and/or use and socioeconomic analysis. OSTI is responsible for managing the department's scientific and technical information, particularly it's scientific publications. DoE researchers located at several National Laboratories are involved in major interagency and international environmental research programs. These include the U.S. GCRP, WOE, and JGOFS. A major new research program in DoE, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program acquires and analyses the environmental data necessary to characterize the climate-cloud mechanisms for understanding climate change. Department of Interior As the major federal land manager and a primary federal agency responsible for managing the Nation's natural ecosystems, fish and wildlife, and energy and water resources, DoI is particularly concerned with environmental monitoring. DoI's programs address topics such as the quantity and quality of the Nation's fresh water resources; geologic processes (including earthquakes) and earth resources; land use, and land cover; biological habitats, resources, and diversity; past environmental change recorded in the physical, chemical, and biological record; land surface and solid-earth processes that relate to environmental change; geography and cartography; polar and arid region processes; ecosystem modeling and dynamics; and resource ethnology. DoI bureaus collect, maintain, analyze, interpret and actively maintain short- and long-term land, water, air, biological, and other natural resource data and information in support of their missions. These efforts require the maintenance and communication of many levels of data and information, whether remotely sensed or gathered in situ, and extensive collaboration across many organizational and technical barriers, nationally and internationally. PART III: Where Do We Want to Be? What is envisioned for the environmental monitoring application area of the NII is a virtual national monitoring system that brings together data sources and data users, integrating existing systems and building upon their strengths. In addition to providing the integration mechanism for the disparate components of U.S. environmental monitoring infrastructure, such a system should have strong links to international observing systems and environmental data centers so that a truly global environmental picture can be assembled. Developing the environmental monitoring application does not mean replacing the existing systems used by various organizations for fulfilling their missions, but rather developing the layer of hardware/software linked via telecommunications facilities providing appropriate transmission capacity and network services. A national environmental monitoring infrastructure should allow the various participating organizations (both public and private) to continue to pursue their individual independent missions while harmonizing their activities with other organizations. It is impossible to quantify the synergy accomplished given the implementation of the infrastructure, but it is very clear that comprehensive environmental management cannot occur without it. PART IV: How Are We Going to Get There? To achieve the goal of a national integrated system for environmental information and services using NII enabling technology requires a commitment on the part of federal agencies to coordinate development and implementation. Plans that currently call for agency-specific development should be reconsidered in light of the need to satisfy larger national goals. Leadership on the part of the federal government is required to foster partnerships among public and private organizations so that each sees a clear benefit in participation and cooperation. We should note that the federal government is providing strategic leadership, e.g., the data management principles, OMB Circular A-130, Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), the NII Agenda for Action, the Government Information Locator Service proposal, the National Environmental Index, and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure plan. The federal government is also helping to development promote many of the critically important technologies and technical standards (e.g., the Internet, the Spatial Data Transfer Standard, the ANSI Z39.50 Information Search and Retrieval Standard). The federal government should commit to providing the organizing principles for the comprehensive framework that underlies environmental information, and should actively promote the consolidated acquisition and other sharing of data, as is done with the National Aerial Photography Program. The federal government should also promote consensus building using electronic mechanisms. Making it happen will require close attention to eliminating some barriers. The following are some of the areas on which we must focus: Interoperability Standards Interoperability may be the single most important issue in realizing the integration of environmental information on the NII; without agreement on interoperability standards and a commitment to adhere to these, we are left with the current set of disparate and isolated environmental information systems. Multidisciplinary analysis, critical to addressing environmental concerns, will be nearly impossible and will proceed at the slow pace that it currently takes by necessity. Environmental observations may be single measurements at one location, time series at a location, digital imagery of the entire planet, swaths of observations of the earth's surface, profiles through the atmosphere, etc. The data types may be text information, or numerical values, graphics products, or digital imagery. The size of environmental data sets may range from single-point measurements to hundreds of terabytes. A proliferation of data formats currently exists to support the myriad of data types. For environmental data to be transported from various observing systems owned and operated by a variety of agencies, integrated into information products, and distributed to the appropriate user on the NII, a set of data formats and electronic information exchange protocols must be universally adopted. Interoperability also implies the existence of user interfaces that are intuitive and common across the various environmental databases. However, the valid integration of information presents fundamental problems of data consistency that must be addressed by the development and application of content and metadata standards. The user should be capable of formulating questions and receiving responses without having to be knowledgeable about how each system is organized. Information Security and Reliability To maintain user confidence in environmental information on the NII, appropriate measures must be taken to preserve the integrity and reliability of data. Any system deployed for information dissemination must incorporate the appropriate safeguards to ensure against the intentional or unintentional corruption of the information. Further, uniform quality standards must be adopted and enforced that ensure that data derived from a number of sources and integrated into information products that are then used by policy makers, scientists, educators or the general public are of consistent high quality regardless of source. The environmental monitoring information must be highly reliable not only in terms of quality but also in terms of timeliness to maintain the confidence of those segments of society who rely on the information for routine forecast purposes, issuing emergency natural hazard warnings, recreation, or in conducting day to day activities. Very Large Data Volumes Planned or currently deployed environmental observing systems, both satellite- and earth-based systems, produce data at ever-increasing rates as the observing technologies extend the spatial, temporal, and spectral coverage of measurements. Some systems are capable of producing hundreds or gigabytes of data daily with much of the transmissions being "bursty" in nature, i.e., large volumes in a short time period. Further, the accumulated databases may range into the hundreds of terabytes. The NII must provide the end-to-end transmission capacity as well as a means of prioritizing transmissions to ensure that data needed for environmental monitoring are available when required by the user. The bandwidth and prioritization consideration are particularly important for real-time environmental data acquisition necessary to protect life and property. Information Access/Connectivity (including international) A definition of levels of access and connectivity must be agreed upon. In many cases, a simple modem and data terminal are all that is required for access to environmental information; in other cases, equipment and connectivity to support virtual reality environments are necessary. A hierarchy of network functions must be defined with the appropriate communications services and technologies. A "floor" or fundamental set of network services available to nearly everyone must be defined and goals should be established on the time frames for providing the fundamental services and the higher service levels. Since environmental issues recognize no national boundaries, the two-way free flow of environmental information must be maintained with other nations who are both consumers of U.S. data as well as producers of data for U.S. consumption. For environmental monitoring considerations, the NII must be sufficiently robust and dependable to provide the transmission medium for data that affect protection of life and property. The data from environmental observing systems must be reliably transported to organizations responsible for emergency preparedness. The information products, including forecasts, warnings, or emergency bulletins, must be reliably transported to the intended target and in a timely way. Exploiting Multiple Uses of Acquired and Processed Environmental Data Environmental data normally have many important uses beyond the primary purpose for which they are acquired. For example, wind measurements may serve the primary purpose of short-term weather forecasting but find important other uses in long-term climate assessment, siting power plants, building design, etc. A variety of agencies are responsible for various environmental observations specific to fulfilling the agency's mission; more often than not, the data are not fully utilized for other purposes and are not integrated with other-agency data because of difficulty of access, lack of adequate documentation, etc. The NII may serve as an integrating medium leading to the sharing of environmental information to provide more comprehensive data sets and improved monitoring. Issues and Questions to Be Addressed The following issues and questions need to be addressed and policies initiated to facilitate the development of the environmental monitoring application as part of the NII. It should be noted that these issues, in and of themselves, will not ensure overcoming the barriers described in the previous section of this paper; but they are a starting point. Full realization of a national environmental monitoring system enabled through the NII will require tackling a full range of issues discussed in this paper. - A Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS) is the cornerstone for collection and dissemination of global change and other environmental data and information for use by the private sector, researchers, educators and others. The importance of this activity must be recognized within the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) process. How should the NSTC Committee on Environmental and Natural Resource Research, with support from the Committee on Information and Communications pursue the full development of a GCDIS that fully satisfies a wide range of public and private information requirements? What actions are required to ensure that all involved federal agencies are appropriately funded? - Several federal agencies are conducting research into systems to handle environmental information. Coordination is required and the effort needs to be expanded to ensure that national needs are met. How should the HPCC Program, through its IITA component, establish a set of environmental information dissemination pilots to stimulate development and test application of new network information navigation and access tools, such as extensions of MOSAIC, that focus on access to very large amounts of heterogeneous environmental information distributed across agencies in many geographical locations? - There is currently no generally accepted methodology or data format to allow easy exchange of data from one agency's system to another and, therefore, a user cannot easily navigate through thousands of environmental databases of the agencies. How should the Federal Geographic Data Committee move forward as directed in the National Performance Review in establishing a National Spatial Data Infrastructure in developing the consensus among federal and private concerns for standards and technologies to facilitate spatial data exchange? How should NOAA take the lead, in response the Executive Order, to coordinate with other federal agencies the development of the National Environmental Index establishing the information content and format standards for cataloging environmental data? How should NIST work proactively with agencies involved in environmental monitoring to ensure the appropriate application of federal systems and information standards? - A very large number of agencies distribute environmental data in electronic form, some of which is fee-based. Currently many agencies (and many sub-agency units) manage billing and accounting services separately, although some use the services of the FedWorld gateway run by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) in the Department of Commerce. In many cases, users must make separate payment arrangements with each database distributor. How can the NTIS or other billing and accounting services be accessible to all government information providers? How can users negotiate costs and billing with a single organization and receive a single bill?  .