Under the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Research to Operation Project (UFS R2O), a global coupled UFS has been built with six components of the Earth system: the FV3 dynamical core (atmosphere), MOM6 (ocean), CICE6 (sea ice), Noah-MP (land surface), GOCART (aerosols), and WW3 (ocean surface waves). The global coupled UFS is used as the basis for developing the Global Forecast System (GFS v17) for medium-range (deterministic) weather forecast up to 16 days, and the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS v13) for subseasonal forecasts up to 48 days, both of which target to be implemented around FY26.
The congressional appropriation in FY23 instructed NOAA to develop a new Seasonal Forecast System (SFSv1) as a replacement of the more than decade-old Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2). The SFSv1 will build upon and extend the capabilities of the subseasonal Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFSv13). Accurate SFS prediction requires improved physical descriptions of slowly changing processes on the land, in the oceans, for sea ice, and for atmospheric composition. Data assimilation improvements are also required to improve initial states for the land, ocean and sea ice that provide the long-term memory of the Earth System.

In this session, we seek to foster enhanced collaboration among model developers, users/stakeholders and researchers for the advancement of NOAA’s S2S Applications (GEFS and SFS). We encourage abstracts on all aspects of NOAA’s S2S Applications that includes feedback and requirements of stakeholders/users, scientific advancements in the Earth system components such as MOM6, CICE6, Noah-MP, Atmospheric Compositions, advancements in infrastructure that facilitate R2O and O2R, process-level understanding of model errors, verification and validation metrics, and common errors in North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) forecast systems. Use of AI methods to diagnose model errors and to improve modeling systems are also encouraged.

Conveners: Yan Xue, OSTI, NWS, Silver Spring, MD; NOAA/NWS/Office of Science and Technology Integration, Silver Spring, MD; Avichal Mehra, NWS/NCEP/EMC, NOAA, College Park, MD; Philip Pegion, NOAA/PSL, Boulder, CO and Deepthi Achuthavarier, NWS/OSTI/Modeling Program Division & IBSS Corporation, Silver Spring, MD