The 2024 NOAA Subseasonal and Seasonal Applications Workshop took place in College Park, MD at the NOAA Center for Climate and Weather Prediction (NCWCP) on September 4th-6th, 2024. The first iteration of this annual hybrid workshop hosted 330 registered participants (in-person and virtual) from the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) research-to-operations (R2O), forecaster, and stakeholder communities across the globe and featured 87 oral presentations and 45 posters. The primary objective of the workshop was to promote the advancement of the subseasonal Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFSv13) and the development of a new Seasonal Forecast System (SFSv1). Through a community modeling approach, NOAA seeks to develop these systems by fostering collaboration among model developers, users/stakeholders, and researchers in the public, private, and academic sectors. To that end, this workshop sought to identify essential points of engagement and collaboration across the S2S community and further delineate critically needed yet undersupported research and development endeavors. Ultimately, these collaborative efforts will guide and inform the formation of best practices and strategies in the development and implementation of operational S2S forecast systems.  

The three-day workshop provided a collaborative forum across eight sessions of oral presentations and poster presentations to address and further discuss key areas of inquiry, development, and innovation within the S2S applications community. The addressed topics encompassed: stakeholder requirements and needs for NOAA’s S2S applications; forecaster’s priorities in improving NOAA’s S2S applications; systematic model errors in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) and other S2S systems with experiences/insights in improving S2S modeling systems; best practices in initializing seasonal forecasts; process-level diagnostics tools and verification metrics; advancements in the development and implementation of GEFSv13; updates in Unified Forecast System (UFS) component models; the SFS Development Plan and early results in the development of SFSv1; and avenues for community engagement and contributions to GEFS and SFS development including the implementation of ML/AI methods to supplement physics-based methods for NOAA’s S2S Applications. Following the conclusion of those sessions, a panel of subject matter experts across the S2S applications community presented their feedback on and critiques of the current SFS Development Plan. Following the panel’s presentations, the workshop organizers opened up a live community-style discussion forum for the workshop participants to supplement the panel’s SFS Development Plan feedback and critiques. Lastly, the workshop participants, session co-chairs, and organizers collected and summarized the key findings from the workshop on a session-by-session basis and presented them in a format that addressed the current trajectory of SFS development and provided critical feedback aimed at charting a path forward that ensures that the next steps of SFS development and future implementation are viable, agile, and pragmatic. 

Before the conclusion of the workshop, the organizers and session co-chairs acknowledged the first, second, and third place winners of the workshop’s Early Career Research Poster Contest. All early career workshop participants who presented a poster were eligible to participate in this contest, and the awardees were selected by a workshop attendee popular vote. The Early Career Research Poster Contest awardees for this year’s workshop were Jingxuan Cui - Colorado State University (Third Place) for “Diagnostics of Oceanic Kelvin Wave Responses to Westerly Wind Events in the equatorial Pacific in CMIP6 models”, John Hammond - USGS Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Water Science Center (Second Place) for “Developing Early Warning Forecasts of Hydrological Drought Onset, Duration, and Intensity Across the Conterminous United States Using Machine Learning Models”, and Pengfei Shi - PNNL (First Place) for “The 4DEnVar-based weakly coupled land data assimilation for E3SM”.

Overall, this workshop proved to be a great success in its inaugural iteration and opened up multiple avenues of engagement across the S2S community that will set the stage for future advancements in NOAA’s S2S forecasting capabilities and readiness to address the ever evolving needs of model users and stakeholders alike.  

View the presentations and recordings