Advancing Operational Modeling Systems at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center: Transitioning to Unified Forecast System Applications

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) is a lead developer of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems that also transitions to operations and maintains more than 20 numerical prediction systems that are used across the National Weather Service (NWS), the broader NOAA, by other United States (U.S.) federal agencies, and various other stakeholders. These systems are developed through a close collaboration with partners from the academic, federal and commercial sectors. EMC maintains, enhances and transitions-to-operations numerical forecast systems for weather, ocean, climate, land surface and hydrology, hurricanes, and air quality for the U.S. and the global community and for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the economy.

 

NOAA’s Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) Project initiated a major shift in the development of operational Earth system predictions with a goal to simplify the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Production Suite using the Unified Forecast System (UFS) framework (https://ufscommunity.org/). EMC has taken a lead in further development and consolidation of NCEP’s operational systems into UFS based applications.  The UFS is being designed as a community-based, comprehensive atmosphere-ocean-sea-ice-wave-aerosol-land coupled Earth modeling system with coupled data assimilation and ensemble capabilities, organized around applications spanning local to global domains and predictive time scales ranging from sub-hourly analyses to seasonal predictions.  Disparate operational applications that have been developed and maintained by EMC in support of various stakeholder requirements are being transitioned to the UFS framework. The transition started a few years ago and is planned to continue over the next few years. The resulting applications will consolidate NCEP’s Production Suite into far fewer applications that share a set of common scientific components and technical infrastructure.  This approach is expected to accelerate the transition of research into operations and simplify maintenance of operational systems.

 

This talk describes major development and operational implementation projects at EMC over the last few years and the plans for the next five years (2023-2027), how those fit within the broader strategic plans of NOAA, and how these projects link with other model-related projects internally within NOAA and with the broader U.S. and international modeling community.