The National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC) is a joint Department of Commerce and Department of Defense initiative to advance the National NWP capability in response to evolving operational needs. The central goals of the program are:

o To execute an operational joint Navy – NOAA global atmosphere multi-model ensemble

o To adopt common NWP practices in order to accelerate model development and achieve developmental and operational efficiencies for the next generation of NWP systems.

o To address common operational needs through a defined National research and development agenda.

The National Unified global atmospheric Ensemble (NUE) transitioned to operations in January, 2011. The NUE is being incorporated into a steadily increasing number of operational products within DOC and DOD and both raw and bias corrected data is available for public use. Also, a common model architecture, the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) became fully operational in July 2011 with release of version 5.2.0r and is being adopted by DOD and DOC as their standard model architecture with the addition of a NUOPC interoperability layer to accelerate inter and intra agency transitions. NUOPC management will provide a progress report on these transitions, an update from the June 2011 User workshop, and plans for accelerating agency and broad community collaboration and transition of global predictive capability.