Design and Development of a Global Coupled Modeling System at NCEP

At the time Dr. Eugenia Kalnay was the director of the Development Division of the National Meteorological Center, the operational implementation of coupled atmosphere-ocean models had already begun at NMC, but only for the tropical Pacific, not globally. Since then, a series of new and improved coupled models have been developed and implemented at NCEP. Currently, the operational Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2) is a fully coupled model representing the interaction between the Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land and sea ice and has incorporated rising levels of CO2 to reflect climatic changes. It became operational at NCEP in March 2011. The CFS has much in common with the operational global atmospheric model (GFS) in terms of atmospheric physics, but one very large difference is the availability of reforecasts for calibrating and estimating skill for the CFSv2, for use in the operational real time sub seasonal and seasonal predictions. The generation of these reforecasts requires initial conditions for past years and a reanalysis using the current system needs to be carried out. Reanalysis, pioneered by Dr. Kalnay, has a clear purpose to generate reforecasts for any new CFS at NCEP. In this presentation, an outline of the next global coupled modeling system at NCEP will be discussed. This will include the interactive coupling of geophysical models of the land, ocean, atmosphere, sea ice, waves, aerosols, and other components of the earth system environment in the NOAA Environmental Modeling System (NEMS) framework.