The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has partnered with the private sector to develop a cloud-based repository of data that would be open to the public, Fedscoop reported Thursday.

Wyatt Kash writes the initiative began in February when NOAA released a request for information and the project is scheduled to kick off in 2015.

David McClure Jr., a data asset portfolio analyst for NOAA, told a forum that the agency gathers up to 40 terabytes of satellite and other Earth data daily but that existing resources limit the amount of data it could produce, according to the report.

“We’re trying to focus on a positive mosaic effect – to discover relationships in the data and pull those together and extract economic value,” McClure told the audience at the AFCEA Bethesda-sponsored event.

McClure also said NOAA also needs to develop methods for validating data and protocols for maintaining data in the planned cloud repository, Fedscoop reports.

NOAA plans to form a common architecture for government-wide data interoperability in order to achieve that goal, Kash reports.