Synergy between Joint Technology Transfer Initiative and Earth Prediction Innovation Center in Advancing NOAA’s Unified Forecast System

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 carried out 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. Additionally, NOAA established the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) program in 2019 whose mission is to serve as the catalyst for community research and modeling focused on informing and accelerating advances in our nation’s operational NWP forecast modeling systems. Within OAR, the Weather Program Office (WPO) is responsible for managing both the JTTI and EPIC programs. While the missions of these two programs are different, the synergy between these programs is essential to successfully complete the R2O2R loop. In terms of execution, the path of the research transition overlaps between these two programs. While JTTI transitions community weather research to the NWS operations, EPIC supports the community modeling infrastructure in forms of the Unified Forecast System (UFS) applications that are similar to operational versions to the community to effectively communicate operational priorities and accelerate transition of modeling innovations to operations. In this paper, we present how JTTI and EPIC work synergistically to complete the R2O2R loop and advance UFS.