NOAA Single Source Determination 13.106_final_Synopsis.pdf

Version 1.0

Source Selection Information – see FAR 2.101 and 3.104

SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION PROCEDURES (SAP)

FOR AN ACTION NOT EXCEEDING THE SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION THRESHOLD

(AUTHORITY: FAR 13.106-1(b)(1))

NEED3000-23-01165

1. Agency and contracting activity. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Acquisition and Grants Office (AGO), Field Delegate proposes to enter into a Purchase Order on a basis of other than full and open competition in support of NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS), Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR).

2. Description of supplies or services required to meet agency needs (including the estimated value).

This Justification and Approval from NOAA intends to award a new Firm Fixed Price contract to acquire Earth Big Data LLC’s SEPPO (Software for Earth Big Data Processing, Prediction Modeling, and Organization) a proprietary software system to scale, optimize, and control large data-processing jobs using cloud-based data storage and computing assets. Value of the contract is expected to be $xxxxxx with a period of performance from Oct 2023-Sep 2023. This will allow NESDIS to integrate Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations (DRSA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) Program funded satellite flood estimates from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) currently running outside of NESDIS into NESDIS Enterprise Cloud Environment. Test flood products are currently supporting National Weather Service (NWS) River Forecast Offices, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), United States Geological Survey, and NOAA’s National Water Center for flood monitoring. SEPPO is a required software to promote these flood products into NESDIS operations. NESDIS Information Technology has provided approval for testing SEPPO into the NESDIS Common Cloud Framework (NCCF).

3. Identification of the single source or the brand name to be solicited. EARTH BIG DATA, LLC, P.O. Box 114, Woods Hole, MA 02543, Josef Kellndorfer, josef@earthbigdata.com, +1 508-444-0885.

a. rationale. Only one source or brand name is reasonably available as detailed below:

Other - Only one source is capable Only one source is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services are unique or highly specialized. The software Earth Big Data LLC holds the sole right to sublicense, distribute, and market SEPPO. SEPPO is new and unique cloud processing system for SAR remote sensing processing at large scales. Earth Big Data LLC developed and released SEPPO in 2023, so many of the components are novel and highly specialized. All currently work for the NESDIS SAR Flood monitoring has been developed with SEPPO integrated into its framework to deal with the large volume processing and leverage modern age set of tools for big data processing tasks. SEPPO also integrates with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the current NESDIS Common Cloud Framework (NCCF) environment.

4. Market Research. See attached Market Research Report

This contract is meant to stage the transition of current NOAA SAR Flood products leveraging multiple satellites from pre-operational external cloud production into NESDIS internal operational cloud production. Current pre-operational production of SAR flood uses Software mailto:josef@earthbigdata.com

(Insert PR/RFQ number, as applicable)

Source Selection Information – see FAR 2.101 and 3.104 for Earth Big Data Processing, Prediction, and Organization (SEPPO) for its NRT flood monitoring and distribution of products to National Water Center, FEMA, River Forecast Offices, and the Flood Proving Ground Test Bed. SEPPO is a novel, modern age set of tools for big data processing tasks largely rooted in well-developed open source libraries and add-on modules wrapping SEPPO around COTS software for processing at scale. The philosophy behind SEPPO is to provide a processing solution close to a user’s Linux environment with a modular design, for combining open source components to optimally customize big data processing solutions. As such, SEPPO provides a rich Application Programming Interface (API) library with many Python and Bash programs and scripts in a native, scalable Linux processing environment. SEPPO development was rooted in scaling geospatial and remote sensing data processing and offers modules for these application domains where SEPPO also emphasizes modern geospatial data mining and time series analysis techniques. While harnessing the cloud-processing solutions offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), SEPPO does not use any proprietary scripting and the entire SEPPO source code is delivered to Earth Big Data customers for its open source, non-COTS components. This contract leverages multiple years of development by NESDIS using SEPPO to leverage its strong and specialize capacity for cloud-based SAR processing and codeveloped extensions for flood mapping. The proprietary nature of SEPPO software and past development of the SAR flood mapping, suggests that this award should be sole source since there is only one vendor that is able to license SEPPO to NOAA. Furthermore, current funding levels were acquired based on Earth Big Data, LLC estimates for SEPPO.

5. Technical/Requirements Representative Certification

I certify that this requirement constitutes the Government’s minimum needs and the supporting data provided herein is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Sean Helfrich, Contracting Officer Representative Date

NESDIS/STAR/SOCD

6. Approval

I hereby determine that the circumstances of this action deem only one source is reasonably available. This determination is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Joel L. Perlroth Contracting Officer Date