Crossing the Valley of Death : Transitioning Weather Research to Operations in NOAA

In 2016, the U. S. Congress created the Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI) program in the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), the research wing of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  Within OAR, the Weather Program Office (WPO) is responsible for managing the JTTI program.  The main mission of this program is to continuously develop and transition the mature weather technologies from the research community to the National Weather Service (NWS) operations.  

JTTI selects promising Research to Operations (R2O) transition projects through two types of competitions: one for the external community (non-NOAA) that includes private, academic sectors and non-profit organizations through Notices of Funding Opportunities; and the other for the NOAA scientific community.  Additionally, the JTTI program collaborates with the NWS Office of Science and Technology Integration (OSTI) and provides funding for the Unified Forecasting System - R2O project and testbed activities.  JTTI-funded R2O projects cover three main frameworks within the NWS forecasting operations: the observational, modeling, and products and services frameworks.  The topics covered include data assimilation; convective scale weather modeling; stochastic physics; ensemble model building; hydrologic modeling; post-processing of model output on time scales ranging from hourly to subseasonal; high impact weather forecasting tools; artificial intelligence/machine learning; and social behavioral and economic science. To date, the JTTI program has funded 155 R2O projects and transitioned 20 projects to the NWS operations.  In this paper, we present the JTTI implementation process in NOAA and share some of the successful R2O stories.