AS3477 NOAA-NWAVE

NOAA-NWAVE is N-Wave, the national science network of the US National Oceanic

and Atmospheric Administration — the federal agency behind the National Weather

Service, ocean and fisheries science, and satellite environmental observation.

What it's used for

• NOAA's agency-wide backbone: a NOAA-owned and operated shared network connecting field sites, campuses, data centers, and supercomputing facilities across the country, including Alaska and Hawaii.
• Moving the large scientific datasets NOAA's mission runs on — weather models, satellite downlinks, and ocean and climate observation data.

Notable

• A government research network, not a commercial ISP. Its several hundred thousand IPv4 addresses serve NOAA's own facilities and partners rather than paying subscribers.
• N-Wave has been in operation since 2009 and is built on partnerships with the academic and state research-network communities.

Interesting

• The ASN itself long predates the N-Wave brand: ARIN's record goes back to 1994, so the number carries NOAA's early-internet allocation forward into the agency's modern science backbone.
• The backbone was upgraded to 100 Gbps in 2019 and to 400 Gbps in 2022, which is the scale that near-real-time weather and climate modeling demands.