IV-ROCS Sole Justification

The National Weather Service (NWS) is a 24-hour, 365-day operation, and is a public safety agency. The primary mission of the NWS is the protection of life and property. IV-ROCS is an interactive voice response (IVR) system consisting of telecommunications lines, data, application and backup servers, IVR software and custom business logic programming used to collect weather observation data by telephone from the National Weather Service’s cooperative observers.

These observations are collected, quality controlled and transmitted to the National Climatic Data Center for dissemination and storage. Interactive Voice (IV) is a commercial off the shelf system that has been modified specifically for NOAA to add the Remote Observation Collection System (ROCS). The use of IV-ROCS is part of the National Weather Service Directive 10-1305 as part of weather observation Real-Time Quality Control (Section 9.2).