Overview of the Next Global Forecast System GFSv17

The Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) is working towards the next operational implementation of the Global Forecast System, GFSv17. This implementation leverages the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Application for Medium Range Weather (MRW) and Sub-seasonal to Seasonal (S2S) and the UFS community at large. A major goal for GFSv17 is to employ a UFS-based fully coupled atmosphere-land-ocean-ice-wave model. The coupled model will be part of a weakly coupled data assimilation system, with new non-atmospheric data assimilation components based on the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) software. There will also be greater alignment with the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) in both model and infrastructure development as well as more consistent GEFS initialization through a new early cycle ensemble analysis from the GFS.

This presentation will provide an overview of the GFSv17 system along with the current status and future plans, while highlighting the connections to the UFS community. Prototype experiment results from the development of the coupled model, as well as data assimilation integration, will also be shared.