Why send your observations to NDBC?

Sending the observations to NDBC via a software encoding kit offers many advantages:

1. Your program will gain increased visibility because your observations will be posted on the National Data Buoy Center's (NDBC) web site which receives about 14 million hits each month.
2. Once NDBC distributes your observations in a standard format, your observations will be readily available to the entire meteorological community including National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices, local television broadcasters, the Tropical Prediction Center (formerly, the National Hurricane Center), the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the Weather Channel, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. These professionals will be able to easily capture your observations and create graphics containing your data without having to "surf the web".
3. Your observations will be available on Dial-A-Buoy, an interactive voice response system managed by NDBC. This allows mariners at sea to access the latest observations via cell phone. See http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/dial.shtml for more details.
4. Your observations will help fill in the gaps between stations in NOAA's national marine backbone and will provide critical real-time information on smaller scale weather or oceanographic features.
5. Your observations will be monitored so that any obviously degraded data will be removed from real-time distribution and you will be notified of such actions.