The Earth Prediction Innovation Center - an Overview of the EPIC Contract

The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) Program is a congressionally mandated program with a mission to be the catalyst for community research and modeling focused on informing and accelerating advances in our nation’s operational NWP forecast modeling systems. As an essential component of the EPIC program, the EPIC contract focuses its teams efforts toward three major strategic outcomes:

• Nurture a highly inclusive and diverse modeling community across the Weather Enterprise;
• Develop a publicly accessible end-to-end testing and development environment for the Unified Forecast System;
• Demonstrate EPIC success by bringing in innovations to improve UFS performance.

To effectively engage the community and provide user support, the contract continuously updates the EPIC community portal (epic.noaa.gov) and EPIC social media accounts, coordinates the publication and contributes to the UFS newsletter, hosts UFS training events and community workshops, and supports UFS users in forms of github forums, tutorials, updating UFS documentation, wiki pages, and frequently asked questions. The team has made improvements to UFS infrastructure by leading platform-agnostic UFS releases, implementing UFS continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, working cooperatively with academic community to support the installation of UFS on academic HPCs, and facilitating UFS and JEDI integration by co-developing, releasing and deploying essential software packages such as spackstack and Unified Workflow tools. The infrastructure and community building efforts have laid the foundation to enable innovations in the UFS, such as the development of an unified conterization approach for the UFS, establishing UFS Atmospheric River engineering prototypes with in-core cycling and machine learning capabilities, and establishing a hierarchical testing framework to enable hierarchical system development for UFS. After this talk, please come talk to the EPIC team, and provide us your roadblocks to success, so we can work with you to get your ideas into operations.