NOAA Weather Program Office (WPO) Initiatives to advance UFS Data Assimilation Research, Education and Community Innovations

NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Priorities for Weather Research (PWR) Report highlights data assimilation (DA) playing a critical role in addressing nearly all NOAA mission areas across scales including improving NWP, optimizing observation network design, producing analyses and reanalyses, and improving numerical models. Investments from NOAA, in collaboration with the broader weather enterprise, have enabled the establishment of the infrastructure for enhancing NWP capabilities, including the Unified Forecast System (UFS) as the community-based model for research as well as NOAA’s operational forecast system, the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) to support the UFS community and codes, and the interagency-based Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI). Yet, critical gaps exist to advance DA capabilities in NWP as a result of a severe lack of DA expertise in the U.S. workforce.

WPO has been funding since 2019 multiple innovative modeling infrastructure and DA focused O2R and R2O projects involving NOAA Laboratories, Centers, Programs, Cooperative Institutes, Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) and the multi-year Contract with Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S). EPIC Program supports several key projects as follows:

1. JCSDA JEDI-Skylab quarterly releases, spack-stack, in-core continuous DA, testing and continuous integration, Observations and Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM);
2. EPIC RI&S Contract to release UFS Land DA JEDI System containing an offline version of the Noah Multi-Physics (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM) with the required software stack and the Interface for Observation Data Access (IODA) and others;
3. WPO Inflation Reduction Act FY24 DA Consortium Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) projects to (a) establish a multi-university consortium to advance DA research and education, and (b) develop a long-term strategic partnership between the consortium, NOAA, and the broader weather enterprise in advancing DA methodologies to improve NWP capabilities using the UFS;
4. DA/Reanalysis Reforecasts in support of Unified Forecast System - Research to Operations (UFS-R2O) Project to complete and evaluate low-resolution 3D-Var ‘scout run’ 30 year reanalysis system developing a weakly coupled DA in support of GFSv17 and GEFSv13 systems;
5. NASA and NOAA joint framework project to perform periodic reanalysis of the coupled Earth system to build a shared framework for reanalysis development and experimentation, leveraging the existing capabilities of each agency.

Future directions in establishing a community modeling infrastructure to accelerate DA Research, Education and Community Innovations with the UFS framework will also be discussed.