Joint Technology Transfer Initiative: A Research to Operations Transition Program in NOAA

In FY2016, 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 into the NWS operations.

Within OAR, the Office of Weather and Air Quality (OWAQ) is responsible for managing this JTTI program and provide funding opportunities to transition latest weather technologies into the NWS operations. Promising transition projects are selected only through competition. Every year, OWAQ seeks proposals from the broader American Weather Enterprise to select promising technologies that can potentially transition to the NWS operations. So far, the JTTI program focused on the following main areas: advancing data assimilation of new observations and data assimilation techniques for convective-scale weather prediction; improving water prediction capabilities through enhancements to the National Water Model; communicating forecast uncertainty; techniques for global and regional-scale predictions out to sub-seasonal time scales; and improving numerical weather prediction modeling through data assimilation, post-processing and verification.

In this paper, we present JTTI program execution, transition planning, and funding opportunities in FY2020 for potential investigators.