NWS Office of Science and Technology Integration: Unified Forecast System

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NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Office of Science and Technology Integration (OSTI) Modeling Program Division is soliciting research proposals to support NOAA’s development of the community-based and comprehensive coupled modeling system, the Unified Forecast System (UFS). The UFS is designed to provide more accurate forecast guidance through operational numerical weather prediction applications. These applications span local and global domains, and predictive time scales from sub-hourly to seasonal (S2S). This solicitation favors projects at specific stages of maturity as signified by their readiness level as described in Section 1.A. There are three competitions from this notification valued at approximately $3,000,000 for the first year of multi-year (2 or 3 year) projects that will advance development of the UFS: 1) Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS); 2) Weeks 3-4/S2S Program; and 3) Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP). Research projects to advance NGGPS will propose accelerating improvement of operational global weather prediction models; coupling among atmosphere, ocean, waves, ice, land and atmospheric composition systems; improving data assimilation techniques; improving physical parameterization schemes; improving ensemble techniques; developing post-processing forecast tools and techniques; or improving software architecture, computational performance and system engineering. Proposals pertaining to the advancement of the Weeks 3-4/S2S Program will focus on the development of a coupled UFS system including coupled data assimilation approaches, extending the forecast of the UFS from 3 weeks to seasonal timescales, and developing metrics including validation/verification and process-level diagnostics. Proposals for the HFIP initiative will relate to research required to improve operational tropical cyclone forecasting to meet societal requirements to save lives and effectively mitigate economic disruption.

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