In Pictures: 8 real-world Big Data deployments

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service

NOAA has been in the big data business for 50 years. It now manages 30 petabytes of new data per year, collecting more than 3.5 billion observations per day from satellites, ships, aircraft, buoys and other sensors. It then uses direct measurement of atmospheric, oceanographic and terrestrial data together with complex, high-fidelity predictive modeling to provide the National Weather Service (NWS). NWS' models generate millions of products per day—weather warnings and guidance provided public and private sector forecasters, including government agencies like the Department of Defense and NASA.