EPIC/UFS Community Support for Earth System Modeling

The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) helps advance the Unified Forecast System (UFS) by providing tools and knowledge to the community. This, in turn, establishes a solid foundation from which the community can contribute innovations back to the UFS. To this end, the EPIC program participates in a broad spectrum of community support tasks, including user support and education, code and data management, and DevOps platform infrastructure. This presentation will highlight user and developer support efforts, particularly those related to documentation, educational content, and GitHub Q&A forums. Additionally, code and data management efforts will be discussed (e.g., data access, feature integration through GitHub Issues, Continuous Integration /Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) testing). Examples will be drawn from work with EPIC-supported repositories such as the UFS Weather Model, the Short-Range Weather Application, the Land Data Assimilation System, the Unified Post Processor, Unified Workflow Tools, and Stochastic Physics. This presentation will provide an assessment of current UFS community support activities, highlight challenges that impact this work, and discuss future options for addressing community gaps and needs.