NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center Update: Transitioning to Unified Forecast System Applications for Operations: Accomplishments till date and Future Plans

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) is a lead developer of operational Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems at the National Weather Service (NWS), which are used for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the economy. EMC transitions to operations and maintains more than 20 numerical prediction systems that are used by NWS, NOAA, other United States (U.S.) federal agencies, and various other stakeholders. These systems are developed through a close collaboration with academic, federal and commercial sector partners. 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 global domains.

NOAA’s operational predictions are transitioning to the Unified Forecast System (UFS) framework in order to simplify the operational prediction suite of modeling systems. 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 from local to global domains and predictive time scales ranging from sub-hourly analyses to seasonal predictions.  Disparate legacy 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 several years ago and is planned to continue over the next few years. Fewer resulting applications will consolidate NCEP’s Production Suite that shares a set of common scientific components and technical infrastructure.  This streamlined suite is expected to accelerate the transition of research into operations and simplify maintenance of operational systems.

There is also a major development effort in the area of AI/ML for NWP, and EMC has stepped up its efforts in adopting and testing the new technologies that show significant promise in revolutionizing operational NWP for NOAA.  

This talk describes major development and operational implementation projects at EMC over the last couple of years, and progress in advancing UFS applications for operations. We will also present EMC plans for AI/ML for NWP, within the overall NOAA strategy, and how planned efforts link with other modeling efforts within NOAA, in the broader U.S. and international community.