NOAA Climate Watch

The NOAA Climate Watch is an online media monitoring system that reveals information flows between stakeholders and provides indicators for assessing the effectiveness of NOAA’s public outreach program. The system analyzes large samples of Web content from multiple sources. Each week, it processes hundreds of thousands of documents from the Web sites of NOAA and its partner organizations, Anglo-American news media, and Web logs (blogs) relevant to NOAA’s core activities. The visual information exploration and retrieval interface of the NOAA Climate Watch provides intuitive access to this abundance of content. It includes geographic displays, domain ontologies, tag clouds, maps of document clusters, and information retrieval agents suggesting documents about similar topics and nearby locations.

The gathered information extends external feedback loops and shows how well NOAA communication is received, understood, and remembered. By uncovering patterns and trends in public discourse, the system helps to reach target audiences more effectively, and to optimize the allocation of available resources. The Climate Watch not only identifies how often, in what media, and where information is presented, but also provides a real-time account of topics that target audiences associate with NOAA and its projects. The positive or negative sentiment of documents is also detected automatically, which is an important indicator to understand the effectiveness of NOAA’s communications strategy.