An Open-innovation and Open-development Framework for the Unified Forecast System Powered by the Earth Prediction Innovation Center

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) established the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) to be the catalyst for community research and modeling focused on informing and accelerating advances in our nation’s operational NWP forecast modeling systems. The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. The UFS numerical applications span local to global domains and predictive time scales from sub-hourly analyses to seasonal predictions. It is designed to support the Weather Enterprise and to be the source system for NOAA‘s operational numerical weather prediction applications. EPIC applies an open-innovation and open-development framework that embraces open-source code repositories integrated with automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines on cloud and on-prem HPCs. EPIC also supports UFS public releases, tutorials and training opportunities (e.g., student workshops, hackathons, and codesprints), and advanced user support via a virtual community portal (epic.noaa.gov). This framework allows community developers to track the status of their contributions, and facilitate rapid incorporation of innovation by implementing consistent and transparent, standardized and community-driven validation and verification tests. In this presentation, I will demonstrate capabilities in the EPIC framework using the UFS Short-range Weather (SRW) Application as an example in the follow aspects:

• Public Releases of a Cloud-ready UFS SRW application with a scalable container following a modernize continuous release paradigm 
• Test cases for challenging forecast environments released with datasets
• Training and Tutorials for users and developers
• Baseline for benchmarking in skill and computation on cloud HPCs , and
• An Automated CI/CD pipeline to enable seamless transition to operations