The NWS Research to Operations Initiative: The Next Generation Global Prediction System

The NWS Research to Operations Initiative has an overarching goal to design, develop, and implement the Next Generation Global Prediction System. Over the next 5 years, the NWS will upgrade its current operational Global Forecast System (GFS) to run operationally as a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice-wave-land-aerosol system. The re-architected GFS software will expose and exploit orders of magnitude more thread and fine-grained parallelism, taking fullest possible advantage of the next-generation of High Performance Computing systems. The current GFS will most likely be retrofitted with a new dynamic core enabling enhanced operational performance along with the capability to scale efficiently to 10-100 K (or more) processors. This improvement, along with continued improvements to the GFS physics, data assimilation, system horizontal and vertical resolution as well as continued improvement tothe other component forecast systems and software engineering will position the NWS to continue advancing the operational performance and associated skill of its current operational NWP skill to longer periods while remaining competitive with other international systems at shorter time periods. An undertaking of this magnitude can only succeed with the combined efforts of the broad weather community in the US, both Government and the private sector. This paper will outline our vision of the future NGGPS, describe the broad effort to achieve a world-class operational Next Generation System and propose specific mechanisms to ensure the participation of the broader community.