The state of the UFS in 2025

The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is rapidly becoming a full open source and open science research and operations capability. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) uses the UFS to simplify its Production Suite of operational models, to enable research and to accelerate the rate of improvement of the Production Suite by transitioning new research into operations. The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) in NOAA has been set up to support the UFS inside of NOAA, as well as to a broad modeling community outside of NOAA. The broader research community uses the UFS as a foundation to their research, as well as using it as a tool to get their research transitioned to (NOAA) operations, in the letter and spirit of the LEGEND Act (15 U.S.C. § 8512a). The poster will lay out the present state of development of the UFS in terms of which community models are presently making up the base code stack of the UFS (now for the first time identifying MPAS as a possible part of this stack), and how this code stack maps to UFS application releases by EPIC, UFS applications in production and UFS applications is research, and will highlight EPIC support for making all this happen.