EPIC and the UFS: a 10-year Retrospective

It has been 10 years since the original Unified Forecast System (UFS) strategic implementation plan was released by NCEP and 6 years since the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) was codified in the National Integrated Drought Information System Reauthorization Act. This talk will compare the original vision to the current state of the community modeling effort in the US. Open innovation is an abstract process with metrics that are hard to quantify. While crowdsourcing model development may be a radical paradigm shift met with technical challenges, procurement hurdles, and cultural resistance, the concept of open innovation has proven successful in many markets. The one common denominator shared by all successful cases is a robust underlying public-private-academic partnership. The weather, water, and climate enterprise is often cited as a successful partnership, but is that really the case when it comes to numerical weather prediction (NWP)? How far have we come? Where are we going? What are the barriers we still face? How do we measure success? Over the last decade, there have been dozens of proposals, initiatives, and large-scale programs to advance US NWP; however, the limited success of these efforts implies there are additional barriers we need to overcome. Unless we fully understand these barriers and why they exist, our strategy for implementing a solution will never meet our ultimate vision. Is the disaggregated structure of NWP in the US truly the root cause of "the uncoordinated giant", and if so, are we really attacking this problem correctly?