The Earth System Prediction Capability Program

The Nation's security and economic well-being rely upon accurate global analysis and prediction capabilities for the physical environment over time scales of a few days to a few decades. Such need is amplified since the government and public sectors are increasingly asking for more accurate and detailed environmental predictions beyond one to two weeks, particularly in the areas of commerce, defense, infrastructure and energy. The scope of this challenge necessitates broad participation from the weather, ocean, space and climate science communities as many of the sources of predictability beyond synoptic timescales rely on coupled ocean-atmosphere and other earth system dynamical interactions. The Earth System Prediction Capability (ESPC) Inter-Agency program was established in 2012 as a coordinating effort to improve collaboration across the federally sponsored environmental research and operational prediction communities for the development and implementation of a national earth system prediction capability. Rather than a single implementation of a prediction system, ESPC is focused on identifying and developing sources of extended range predictability as well as supporting the basic architectural foundations such as common coupled modeling architectures, data and archive standards, and performance metrics. It is expected that these supporting technologies will expand the scope of collaborative model development and that common case studies and evaluation data sets will aid improved understanding of underlying physical processes. Towards these goals, a set of five demonstration projects are under development and researchers are invited to participate in the definition and execution of the projects.

These demonstrations are currently under development by a set of volunteer working groups across the weather and climate prediction community. The goal of these five-year efforts is to provide a unifying theme for developing the common modeling environment, establishing a community model repository of common data sets & test cases, and assess forecast skill at the ranges of interest across multi-year hindcasts to assess predictability against potential DoE, DoC, and DoD user needs and to begin to develop guidelines for the future operational capability. Through this effort it is expected that critical path science and technology issues will be identified and addressed. The areas for the ESPC Demonstrations are: Episodic Weather Extremes: Predictability of Blocking Events and High Impact Weather at Lead Times of 1-6 Weeks; Seasonal Tropical Cyclone Threat: Predictability of Tropical Cyclone Likelihood, Mean Track, and Intensity from Weekly to Seasonal Timescales; Arctic Sea Ice Extent and Seasonal Ice Free Dates: Predictability from Weekly to Seasonal Timescales; Coastal Seas: Predictability of Circulation, Hypoxia, and Harmful Algal Blooms at Lead Times of 1-6 Weeks; Open Ocean: Predictability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) from Monthly to Decadal Timescales.

The goal of ESPC is to create a high-resolution, extended range, coupled atmosphere, ocean, land, ice, and space national capability that will produce more accurate and longer range predictions at the weather-climate scale interface for use in policy, investment, and implementation decisions affecting the economy and protection of the US population. The ESPC effort will seek to coordinate and enhance sponsor-level multi-year investments from basic science to acquisition and operations. This long term investment will build the next generation prediction capability through leverage and integration of current and future advances in national environmental prediction and climate projection modeling systems.