GEOSS was designed to bring together both legacy and yet-to-be-implemented hardware and software in a compatible manner in order to derive the greatest scalability, the lowest cost and the firmest control over the migration of these systems into their technological futures.

Thousands of individual pieces of technology are gathering earth observations around the globe at this moment, performing such valuable tasks as estimating crop yields, monitoring water and air quality, and improving airline safety. As a single indicator of this value, consider that U.S. farmers gain about $15 of value for each $1 spent on weather forecasting. Benefits to U.S. agriculture from altering planting decisions are estimated at over $250 million.

But while there are thousands of moored and free floating data buoys in the world's oceans, thousands of land-based environmental stations, and over 50 environmental satellites orbiting the globe, all providing millions of data sets, most of these technologies do not yet interoperate. Until they do - and all of the individual technology is connected as one comprehensive system of systems -- there will be blind spots, uncertainty and wasted opportunity.

The challenge is to connect the scientific dots. The productivity gains to be realized by doing so will be analogous to those achieved when the myriad isolated personal computers in use since the 1980s became networked in the 1990s. Whether or not humankind ever realizes a single means of communication, our scientific observation systems must. If they did, US energy costs could be cut by about $1 billion yearly. Biodiversity data could help detect the next emerging diseases. Drought and stream flow data could help manage drinking water. Air quality and other environmental effects could be predicted in near real-time.