The U.S. Air Force Weather Enterprise and UK Meteorological Office: An Invaluable Partnership to Strengthen our Science and Defense

The United States Air Force Weather Enterprise (AFWE) and the United Kingdom Meteorological Office (UKMETO) have a long-standing partnership that involves sharing of tools, methods, and subject matter expertise. In 2015 the Global Air-Land Weather Exploitation Model (GALWEM) was implemented as the primary Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model for the AFWE to meet the warfighter global requirements. GALWEM is a version of the Unified Model (UM) specifically designed for the AFWE. In preparation for the challenges presented by High Performance Computing and NWP in the next generation era, AFWE also contributes to the Next Generation Modeling Systems program, which is developing Momentum, the Unified Earth Environment Prediction Framework, which will in time replace the UM.

The AFWE use of GALWEM has fostered sharing of NWP expertise from both organizations and has expanded to include other critical areas of mutual interest. These include:

• The bi-annual Executive Weather Coordination Group (EWCG): a strategic US-UK planning meeting with the aim to address key issues expected on a 12–24-month timescale—such as resiliency, climate, and defense.
• The AFWE participates in the annual Met Office Scientific Advisory Committee meeting (MOSAC) which covers a wide variety of topics such as data science, urban scale modeling, NWP verification, and more.
• The UM/LFRic Partnership is a consortium of several international meteorological centers that focus on the scientific and technical development of modeling systems, leveraging from the expertise from multiple countries to improve all components of a Seamless modeling system.
• The UKMETO recently organized the Future of Defence MetOc Visualisation (FODMOV) workshop which aims to explore environmental data visualization and how it meets future defense requirements providing strategic and tactical advantage.
• Finally, the MET5 is a program that includes the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and focuses on defense applications.

This presentation will include details of the collaborations noted above, including the successes, challenges, and plan of action of multiple technical and defense related issues including AI/ML, Cloud Migration, resiliency and more.