Analysis and Nowcast in an Unified Production Suite of the National Weather Service

Operational environmental modeling, with a focus on weather modeling, represents a foundational effort for NOAA to fulfill its mission. The operational part of this modeling suite is operated by the National Weather Service (NWS), and is generally known as the “production suite”. Traditionally, the production suite has focused on solutions for isolated parts of the NOAA mission, which has resulted in a disparate quilt of models and products, with often overlapping applications. External reviews of the production suite have long called for a simplification and unification of the production suite, focusing on requirements and products rather than on solutions.

During the last few years, the NWS has started moving to unified modeling for global applications in the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) project. As part of this project, the NWS has selected the FV3 dynamic core developed by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) of NOAA as the foundation of the global coupled models. The next step in unifying the production suite is to address convection allowing modeling (CAM), nowcasts and analysis. The NWS has committed to also using the FV3 dynamic core for these higher-resolution, generally regional applications. Furthermore, the NWS is designing a unified analysis capability, around the new Rapidly Updating Analysis (RUA) application. The RUA and the shortest range CAM models are subject of this session of the AMS conference. This presentation will focus on how to integrate the latter approaches into a unified modeling and analysis framework.