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NOAA looks forward to a day when, as the NationalWeather Service did with weather forecasting, the ClimateService will spawn a new private industry providingservices and products based on climate data.The Climate Service will play an important role inNOAA’s overall mission of rendering U.S. ecosystems,communities and economies more resilient inthe face of change. “By providing critical planninginformation that our businesses and our communitiesneed, the NOAA Climate Service will help tacklehead-on the challenges of mitigating and adaptingto climate change,” said then-Commerce SecretaryGary Locke at the February 8, 2010 announcement ofthe new service.If the reorganization goes well, it will be a major partof Glackin’s professional legacy. “It’s a nice time tobe at NOAA because the science is exciting, and society’sdemand for information is at an all-time high,”she says.Connecting the DataNOAA likes to combine knowledge and people in innovative,practical and sometimes surprising ways,Glackin points out. For example, management of thenation’s fisheries and marine sanctuaries, an importantpart of NOAA’s mission, has benefited from anoverhaul of the National Weather Service and an expandedcapacity for using more sophisticated satellitesthat came on line during Glackin’s tenure.“When I came into the agency, there was very littleconnection between the people who were makingweather forecasts for things like precipitation and thepeople who were managing fisheries,” Glackin says.“Today we know how a harmful algae bloom [that killsfish] develops and how it is influenced by precipitationpatterns. Across NOAA, you have people workingtogether collaboratively to provide innovative servicesthat nobody really thought about 33 years ago.”Glackin played a key role in modernizing the weatherservice to better connect forecasters with data andto enable its forecasts to be more broadly used. From1993 to 1999 she directed the program building theAdvanced Weather Interactive Processing System(AWIPS), a 10-year project at the core of the NWSmodernization. AWIPS gave forecasters, for the firsttime, access to Doppler radar data, satellite imagery,automated weather observations and computer-generatedforecasts from a single work station.Even before the Climate Service goes into action,NOAA has been moving to better corral and presentclimate data. In February 2010, the agency unveiled aprototype Climate Services portal 1 that will evolve intoa go-to Web site for NOAA’s climate data, products,and services for all users. Initially, the site is focusingon displaying some of NOAA’s most popular datasets, along with an online magazine, video interviews1 http://www.climate.govNOAA “‘called on the breadth of its expertise,’” Glackin says—from seafood safety to air quality—to respond to the massive oilspill from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.36 Leadership | CGI INITIATIVE FOR COLLABORATIVE GOVERNMENT | S P R I N G 2 0 11