What’s New?

This summer, the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) will deliver a five-day Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop (UIFCW) at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, 24-28 July 2023. Throughout the week, attendees will have the opportunity to present their research, learn about updates to the UFS, share challenges and successes related to UFS contributions, and voice their thoughts on where the future will take us from here. The workshop’s goal is to engage the greater Weather Enterprise in the ongoing effort to accelerate contributions to the Unified Forecast System. The theme for this year’s workshop is Innovation and Community.

Register here. Submit an abstract here.

Abstracts are due on May 31, 2023. 

Registration is due on July 17, 2023.

More info

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The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the UFS Land Data Assimilation (DA) System v1.1.0. More Info

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The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the UFS Land Data Assimilation (DA) System v1.0.0. This is the initial release of this system, which can be used to run the Noah-MP land model in offline mode with an Optimal Interpolation-based snow depth update. This release can be used on a number of NOAA computing systems or in container mode on other computing systems. Future releases will include ensemble data assimilation methods and expanded computing system support.

The Land DA System is an offline version of the Noah Multi-Physics (Noah-MP) land surface model (LSM) used in the UFS via the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP), and it is currently being tested for operational use in GFSv17 and RRFS v2. Its data assimilation framework uses the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) software stack, which includes the Object-Oriented Prediction System (OOPS) for the data assimilation algorithm, the Interface for Observation Data Access (IODA) for observation formatting and processing, and the Unified Forward Operator (UFO) for comparing model forecasts and observations.

The offline Noah-MP LSM is a stand-alone, uncoupled model used to execute land surface simulations. In this traditional uncoupled mode, near-surface atmospheric forcing data are required as input forcing. This LSM simulates soil moisture (both liquid and frozen), soil temperature, skin temperature, snow depth, snow water equivalent (SWE), snow density, canopy water content, and the energy flux and water flux terms of the surface energy balance and surface water balance. Its data assimilation framework applies the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter-Optimal Interpolation (LETKF-OI) algorithm to combine the state-dependent background error derived from an ensemble forecast with the observations and their corresponding uncertainties to produce an analysis ensemble (Hunt et al., 2007).

A newly-created User’s Guide is available here to provide further information about the Land DA System and instructions for running and testing the system. Data files required to run Land DA are available to the public in the Land DA data bucket. Interested users can get support by submitting a question through GitHub Discussions.

This inaugural Land DA release is a collaboration between the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), and the Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL). It uses Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) software developed by the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) and the CCPP software developed by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC). Publicly available data is provided via an AWS S3 bucket established as part of the NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) Program.

This release was funded by the NOAA Weather Program Office’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center Program and the National Weather Service Office of Science and Technology Integration Modeling Programs.

Community News

Ever wondered what the UFS is? Check out the latest downloadable brochure here

The UFS community is proud to announce the public release of the UFS Short-Range Weather Application v2.0.0 (SRW App)  Read more

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v6.0.0 public release. Read more

The EPIC team has recently succeeded in running the UFS weather model on all 3 CSPs. Read more about it here.

Richard Rood is sharing a presentation he made as a guest lecturer on weather analysis providing insight and explaining the work of the UFS. Details here

Neil Jacobs has been chosen to serve as chief science advisor for the UFS. His tenure began February 14, 2022. See the Press Release.

The UFS Community was a presence at the 2022 AMS meetings for a recap of the events and other information please visit here.

The NOAA Modeling Board will be holding a TED-style talks that will be open to the public . These are virtual meetings.  Find out more about the NOAA Modeling Board here.

The UFS Community has contributed to NOAA Science Advisory Board’s latest report on Priorities on Weather Research. Please check out the report and the acknowledgement letter 

News Archive

Check out the latest edition of the UFS Quarterly Newsletter