Founded on October 3rd, 1970, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shortened to the acronym NOAA, is an American scientific agency that is part of the United States Department of Commerce. NOAA is dedicated and focuses on the conditions of the oceans, major waterways, and the atmosphere. Although not necessarily “space” related, this organization does assist with atmospheric data on Earth and does provide crucial data that assist with Earth Science. There are several different branches of NOAA that encapsulates their work, but one that can be useful for space travel and does benefit from utilizing space as a resource is the National Weather Service.

NOAA warns of dangerous weather, charts seas, guides the use and protection of ocean and coastal resources, and conducts research to provide understanding and improve stewardship of the environment. Its research and operations are further supported by uniformed service members who make up the NOAA Commissioned Corps.

The work that NOAA does is very important to monitoring the atmosphere and weather for the planet, which helps determine how the planet is changing. This is crucial to help determine policy and actions taken by humanity to provide the best opportunity to keep the environment healthy. NOAA is a very important organization that might get taken for granted by some at times, but is crucial to our understanding of the planet Earth.

In regards to Earth Sciences, the organization can help predict Earth based weather earlier and more accurately and provide data that can be used to model the atmospheric conditions for other planets. Although humanity has yet to terraform and colonize other planets, if done successfully, the work done by NOAA, algorithms and expertise, would be able to be utilized to help predict the potential weather for the terraformed planet. However, at the point at which that would happen would be several hundred years from now at the very least.

References And Further Reading

https://www.noaa.gov