The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Chief Information Officer (CIO), Joseph F. Klimavicz, visited the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville recently and toured ERC Broadband as well. As a strong and active partner with NCDC, ERC Broadband is continually investigating ways to improve its communications infrastructure and expand its support.

Business climate: Asheville luring weather industry

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — With growing consensus that the planet will be heating up in the next century, Asheville's economic
prospects could be heating up as well, with new businesses emerging to cope with climate change.
"The climate is ours to lose. We want to strike while the iron is hot," said Janice Brumit, the incoming president of the Hub
Project Cabinet's executive committee.
The Hub Project has pulled together civic, academic, business and elected leaders to talk about how to develop Asheville and
Buncombe County's economy, building on the area's existing strengths and assets. Rather than hunting for huge companies to relocate here with
manufacturing jobs, Hub backers want to promote homegrown industries and jobs that aren't likely to leave for cheaper labor
overseas.

After about 2 1/2 years of discussion and study, the Hub Project is now at a crossroads, Brumit said. The project needs money and
authority from local governments, and it needs a success. The one that could propel us forward would be our climate
initiative. That's ours to gain or lose. We're in competition with Boulder, Colo., and Oklahoma and others who are going after
huge federal agencies. But we have that type of industry and those kinds of databases right here," Brumit said.
Hub leaders are looking to the Asheville-based National Climatic Data Center to not only generate information but perhaps new
industry for the area.

The NCDC, the archiving agency of the National Climatic Data Center, has been quietly accumulating the world's largest
collection of weather records going back for more than a century. All the data from radar stations and satellites orbiting the globe ultimately land in Asheville,
piped in through lightning-fast fiber optic lines of the ERC Broadband network. The multimillion dollar Internet network matches the
capacity of major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta or Washington. And it's not just data that's here, but the brainpower to interpret and analysis it.
A number of the experts who contributed to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports live and work in Asheville. The first weather
industries and academic centers have started showing up in Asheville to take advantage of the data and the expertise. Alan Basist worked at NCDC
for seven years until he decided to take a risk, taking his expertise into the private sector. In 2003, he launched Commodity Hedgers Inc.,
creating his own tools to analyze weather data. Using microwave sensors from satellites that can peer through cloud cover as well as other models,
Commodity Hedgers estimates the moisture in the soil and delivers reports about agricultural production around the world. Basist's client list is
confidential, but he says business has been growing. He sees potential for other weather-related companies here.

"Asheville is primed for that. We have the largest archive in the world here, and there are all sorts of applications that
business could come and glean and that consumers could benefit from," he said.

Baron Advanced Meteorological Systems relocated to Asheville in 2003, looking for closer access to the NCDC's live radar feeds to develop the
weather forecast models it sells to TV weather stations nationwide. The BAMS model correctly forecast the path of Hurricane Charley across central
Florida in 2004 when the official government model got it wrong. The company also is working on flood forecasting tools for emergency and municipal
planners. With a third of the U.S. economy sensitive to changes in weather, accurately knowing the weather can save businesses and government money,
said Greg Wilson, president of BAMS. Being close to the weather data makes financial sense even in an age when the Internet makes the data available to
anyone anywhere in the world with a computer. Mining the massive databases takes incredible amounts of bandwidth, explained Louis Vasquez, the network
architect at ERC Broadband, which provides the NCDC with its Internet pipeline to the outside world. It would pay some companies to be physically closer
to those archives, rather than try to transport all the data they need to a distant city for analysis.

"If you're at a hub, you can buy massive connectivity," Vasquez said. The broadband network has designed Asheville as a hub with ready access to Atlanta
and Washington.

"When you think of Asheville, you think of arts and crafts. Asheville is not on anyone's map for technology," said John Stevens, director of the National
Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center at UNC Asheville. That may be about to change with the Hub Project and the new concern about climate
change, said Stevens, who also heads the Hub's technology cluster study group. Besides the data, Asheville could become a magnet for the best minds in the
climate world. Arts and science and technology could merge as digital artists help scientists create visualizations for the complex environmental changes.

That kind of collaboration has already brought another academic center to town with the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Asheville. Part of a
statewide initiative to bring computer tools to the public sector, RENCI will work on developing 3-D visualizations to help emergency planners forecast
the effects of future flooding in Western North Carolina, saving property and possibly lives. While NCDC has the raw data, scientists don't have all the
answers to the social implications of climate change.

"It will take a multidisciplinary approach," Stevens said. Stevens said he could see international conferences coming to Asheville to capitalize on the climate
data here.

"We have something special here. If we're economically successful, we could attract federal state, and private dollars to launch a climate institute here."

But the Hub's ultimate success in building a new economy can be measured in old-fashioned jobs and better wages for everyone in Buncombe County, Brumit said.

We have to show how any of these projects will contribute to the quality of life here and how average citizens would benefit from the creation of these
jobs," she said.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hunter Goosmann was in San Antonio, Texas, in January, 2007 to support the Asheville Chamber and the Asheville HUB's economic development efforts. In Texas, this group manned a booth at the annual conference of the American Meteorological Society.