Home SFS Application Team Outcomes Products & Stakeholders Related Events Related Documents
 

About the Seasonal Forecast System

The inaugural National Weather Service (NWS) seasonal forecast system, implemented into operations in August 2004, is the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System (CFSv1), a quasi-global, fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-land system. Over the years, NCEP has leveraged contemporaneous scientific and high-performance computing innovations to continuously advance its operational seasonal forecast system, with the implementation of the NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2) in March 2011. The CFSv2 is a global atmosphere-land-ocean-sea ice coupled model that supports forecasts out to 9 months and features the generation of a 32-year (1979 - 2010) Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) and reforecast dataset. CFSv2 is also a participant model of the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME), a multi-model ensemble seasonal forecasting system implemented in August 2011. The NMME is not only used to provide guidance for NOAA operational forecasts, but has also enabled numerous studies on seasonal forecast skill, sources of predictability, and downstream applications of seasonal forecast datasets.

In Fiscal Year 2023, the U.S. Congress appropriated funds to support the development of a new operational Seasonal Forecast System (SFS) as a replacement of the more than decade-old CFSv2. In response to this mandate, the NOAA/NWS Office of Science and Technology Integration (OSTI) Modeling Program and the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Program Office (WPO) S2S Program jointly established the SFS Project and associated SFS Application Team in October 2023 with the goals to build the next-generation operational Seasonal Forecast System Version 1 (SFSv1) at NCEP.

In June 2024, a SFS Development Plan was drafted by the SFS Application Team. The SFSv1 will be built with the Unified Forecast System (UFS) model infrastructure and workflow systems. The UFS model infrastructure consists of the FV3 atmospheric dynamical core, atmospheric physics parameterizations developed within the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) framework, MOM6 ocean, CICE6 sea ice, Noah-MP land, and WW3 wave components, which are the basis for NOAA’s next-generation Global Forecast System (GFS) for weather time scales, the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) for subseasonal time scales, and the Seasonal Forecast System (SFS) for seasonal time scales. The GFS, GEFS, and SFS will all rely on the operational Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) for initialization.

The goals of the SFS Application Team are to:

  • Develop SFSv1 as a replacement of the currently operational NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2)
  • Address the common errors and biases in CFSv2 and the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME)
  • Release the coupled SFSv1 to the public as an operational forecast application
  • Generate and release SFSv1 reanalysis and reforecast datasets to the public

Contact Information:

Yan Xue (Program Manager, NWS/OSTI Modeling) at Yan.Xue@noaa.gov
Mark Olsen (Program Manager, OAR/WPO S2S) at Mark.Olsen@noaa.gov
Daryl Kleist (Federal Oversight Manager, NWS/NCEP/EMC) at Daryl.Kleist@noaa.gov
Fanglin Yang (Federal Oversight Manager, NWS/NCEP/EMC) at Fanglin.Yang@noaa.gov
Steven Simon (Deputy Program Manager, NWS/OSTI Modeling) at Steven.Simon@noaa.gov
Jason Anderson (Deputy Program Manager, NWS/OSTI Modeling) at Jason.r.anderson@noaa.gov