SEEKING PARTNERSHIP WITH PRIVATE SECTOR TO ENLARGE AUTOMATED TELEPHONE DISSEMINATION SYSTEM The National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), a part of the National Weather Service (NWS), to further its public safety mission, has launched an automated telephone dissemination system for marine obsevations and forcasts. This proof-of-concept system, called Dial-A-Buoy, provides marine weather and sea state measurements taken each hour at 65 buoy and 54 Coastal-Marine Automated Network (C-MAN) stations. The stations are located in the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes. Dial-A-Buoy provides the mariner a way to obtain the conditions while offshore or at a marina via a cell or touch tone phone. Dial-A-Buoy uses computer-generated voice to read selections from NDBC's web site which contain the observations and coastal marine forecasts. Users enter a station identifier to control which pages are read. If this is an unknown, users can request regional maps showing these identifiers via automated facsimile or enter a latitude and longitude to obtain the nearest station. NDBC is seeking to partnership with the private section to enlarge the initial system, which is currently limited to seven incoming phone lines, VIA A PRIVATE-SECTOR FUNDED PARTNERSHIP. This system is anticipating heavy usage since the NDBC web site, http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/, that posts marine observations, records about a million "hits" each month. Another NWS web site, http://www.nws.fsu.edu/buoy/, that features NDBC observations, records over three million "hits" each month. Dial-A-Buoy was created in response to mariner's comments left at these web sites requesting methods to obtain the data when offshore. Private sector expansion would not only allow greater telephone access, but could reduce line charges. Of course, other weather products and services could be offered via this telephone system. A system can be installed at any site using a combination of commercially available and government-provided software that points to NDBC's web site through the Internet. NDBC's web site has special tags that work in combination with the software to read only the latest observation from the selected station page. The commercially available software is called Web-on-Call, it runs on Windows NT Pentiums or Sun Solaris workstations. Web-on-Call controls the telephone dialog and provides the computer voice generation. Government-provided software consists of several PERL scripts used in conjunction with Web-on-Call on the same computer system. Some of these scripts translate the keyed-in station identifier to a request for specific pages from NDBC's web site. These pages contain the station observation or marine forecast valid for the station location. Another script determines the nearest NDBC station given an entered latitude and longitude. These scripts may require modification for your particular dialog and NDBC is not responsible for such modification. To try NDBC's Dial-A-Buoy system, dial (228)688-1948. Enter a "1" in response to the prompt and then the five-digit (or character) station identifier, when prompted, to hear the latest station observation. To find where NDBC stations are located, see NDBC's web site, http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/. To enter characters, simply press the telephone key containing the character. For example, to request the observation for CHLV2, press the keys "24582". For "Q" press "7", and for "Z" press "9". For mariners that do not know the station identifier, two options exist. First, they can enter the latitude and longitude in response to the prompts and obtain the nearest station identifiers. Second, mariners can enter a facsimile machine number and receive a regional map of their choice showing NDBC station location. The National Data Buoy Center point-of-contact is David Gilhousen (228)688-2840 or dgilhousen@ndbc.noaa.gov.

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