Joint Technology Transfer Initiative: Transitioning MetPlus Tools to NWS Operations

In FY2016, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research’s (OAR) appropriation included an increase of $6M to create a new program called the Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI). OAR received increased funding in the subsequent years in support of this program. OAR executes this program in coordination with the National Weather Service (NWS), and in cooperation with the American weather enterprise. JTTI’s main mission is to transition promising matured weather research from the American Weather Enterprise to the NWS operations.

Within OAR, the Weather Program Office (WPO) is responsible for managing the JTTI program. Promising transition projects are selected through external competitions (Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) through Grants.Gov) for non-NOAA scientists and internal competitions for NOAA scientists. More than half of JTTI funded R2O projects support advancement of the Unified Forecast System (UFS). Verification and Validation is one of the components of the UFS. MetPlus is chosen as the tool for the verification and validation of the UFS applications. So far, through NOFOs and NOAA internal competitions, JTTI has funded 6 MetPlus R2O projects. In this paper, we present how JTTI funds verification and validation projects, how they are evaluated in various NOAA testbeds and provide examples of promising MetPlus projects for NWS operations.