Using NOAA-Epic Containers to Build and Run UFS Applications on Any System

NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS) is incredibly complex and requires dozens of base libraries built in a particular way using specific releases. The overwhelming complexity of the system and its ever-changing set of requirements are the biggest challenge to increasing NWP community engagement and adoption of the UFS. The EPIC program is addressing this challenge by providing containers with the latest required support libraries that allow UFS applications to be built simply and easily. The containers also include scripts that “externalize” the executables such that they can be run directly on the host system and be easily incorporated into workflows of any kind. The methodology of the containerization approach and how it can be applied to nearly any system will be discussed.