I've used NOAA data to investigate how weather effects production and energy consumption in manufacturing environments.
I found the data to be of good quality, free, and a simple interface to interact with.
One day I went to export data from their web portal and it never seemed to be ready. I shot an email off with no expectation of a response, but a little while later I got a nice response from their system administrator that they were doing an upgrade and some jobs got backed up in the queue. My limited experience with them has been all positive.
NOAA is very hit or miss with their data. I spent a lot of time this summer with the NOAA buoy data. So much of it is available and well documented. The historical and live CSV's are useful, but there is also the stuff where a column name doesn't link up to any of the docs and you have to dig through papers and reverse engineer the correct equation.
The biggest downside is the buoy's are rather old so you don't get a lot of data. Nowadays we could design a buoy that streamed back all of its raw data. But the buoys are designed with bandwidth constrained hardware so they do the analysis on the machine and return the summary results infrequently. It really limits what you're able to do with the data. Especially holding back from machine learning capability.
Their forecasts are used by basically all the news reports in the entire country. They might actually have the most direct effect on your life of any agency out there. When there is a warning or watch it's basically their call.
Something about NOAA brushing shoulders with what could have been existential disaster[1] to the detriment of the public, only to resume their mission of diving head first into natural ones supported by the first-to-market ethos of a modern startup has poetic justice vibes to it. A win for both Saildrone and the general public at large.
Their forecasting graphics (probability distributions of tropical cyclone tracks, wind speeds, rainfall, et cetera, all overlaid on maps) are direct and easy-to-read, and do a good job of conveying the uncertainty of the behavior of these storms in a way that's legible to a lay person.
From my impressions, NOAA is a very useful agency that delivers on its mission pretty well. But I never interacted with them directly.