Update on the Activities of NOAA’s Weather Program Office, Including FY23 and FY24 Annual Funding Competitions and a new University Consortium for Data Assimilation

In this presentation, we provide an update on the activities of the Weather Program Office (WPO) since the establishment of a new strategic plan in late 2022. WPO has already started to make substantial progress across all of the strategic goals established in its plan. This presentation will also provide additional information about past, current, and future WPO funding opportunities organized by WPO for the weather research community. We will discuss the results of the first ever WPO innovations competition, which focused on lower-RL innovative research using the Unified Forecast System, as well as competitions from our observations and social science programs. We will also discuss current FY24 funding competitions, including the annual WPO funding opportunity which will include competitions for fire weather modeling and innovative climate testbeds, as well as a $7M competition for a data assimilation consortium of universities using funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. Finally, we will solicit input on broad scientific challenges for our FY25 funding competition, in which many of our programs will be holding competitions. Based on guidance from our recent WPO program review, WPO intends to pursue more multidisciplinary research competitions in future years where multiple WPO programs across the weather value chain focus on components of larger scientific and technology weather research challenges. This more holistic science management approach will help accelerate progress towards addressing societal needs associated with these challenges.