Robbie Hood has served as the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program office since 2008 and has been part of some pretty incredible developments in that time. Her keynote at the Commercial UAV Expo focused the impact of UAVs on investments in data management, and she made sure to highlight how and why data is a key component in everything for NOAA.

We caught up with her to explore a few of the details she discussed during her keynote, asked specifically about how NOAA is utilizing drones, how they want to be utilizing drones and plenty more.