One of the challenges facing today’s Earth system scientist is being able to navigate the ever increasing amount of sensor data available from a wide variety of in situ and dynamic environmental sensors. A key aspect of managing these sensor data in near real time is providing efficient discovery, access and processing of sensor observations. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) suite of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) specifications, some newly released and others under development, provides standards for data and information acquisition from sensor systems and data repositories. The Sensor Management for Applied Research Technologies (SMART) project is applying Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) technologies to the real world problem of efficiently assimilating NASA satellite data into weather forecast models in near real time. By implementing SWE protocols and services into our Data Assimilation System we expect to realize a processing framework that is distributed, interoperable and plug-and-play, thereby increasing access to scientific products in a more efficient, autonomous, and affordable way.