An Assessment of WAM-IPE Forecast System Operational Outputs Throughout the Gannon Storm: Lessons Learned and Persisting Operational Gaps

The WAM-IPE Forecast System (WFS) has been operational at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) since July 2021, providing a coupled specification of the whole neutral atmosphere and global ionosphere in multiple concepts of operations (CONOPs). The Gannon Storm represented the first opportunity for the WFS to undergo G5 conditions in real-time. While the model outputs proved useful to SWPC's users throughout the event, the behavior of the modeling suite also highlighted significant opportunities to improve both its technical and scientific qualities. We cover its operational forecasts through the storm, as well as retroactive analyses following a swift series of upgrades, and discuss the near-term roadmap for research-to-operations and operations-to-research (R2O2R) tasks as they pertain to improving SWPC's neutral density and ionospheric forecasting capabilities.