The Unified Forecast System: Principles and Progress

In the last few years, operational modeling of the environment at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ihas been moving towards a Unified Forecast System (UFS) approach based on open source community models and tools. For NOAA, the main benefits of this approach are to more rapidly transition innovations into operations, and simplifying NOAA’s production suite of models around selected UFS applications. For the broader community, this approach makes operational models easily available for a broad range of research, as well as for testing new ideas in a vetted, near-operational environment.

The presentation will outline the basic principles of the UFS, as well as progress made so far. The latter will highlight code releases and operational implementations, UFS governance, UFS support by the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), and progress with pre-operational prototype coupled models.