UFS-R2O First Annual Meeting - July 12-15, 2021

The Unified Forecast System (UFS) Research-to-Operations (R2O) Project will hold its first annual meeting on 12-15 July 2021. The UFS-R2O Project makes use of the UFS, a community-based, coupled comprehensive end-to-end Earth system data assimilation and prediction system. The UFS and the UFS-R2O Project were established in response to advice from the community that NOAA modeling and data assimilation needs to be integrated and collectively managed, based on a unified modeling framework in a unified collaborative strategy. The UFS-R2O Project is a broad collaboration among NOAA and non-NOAA scientists that was launched in July 2020 to accelerate innovation into NOAA operational modeling for weather and climate prediction. The Project, an experiment to carry out research and development collaboratively across the community within the constraints imposed by operational imperatives and public release timelines, is being supported by coordinated two-year funding from both NOAA National Weather Service’s Office of Science and Technology Integration and NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research’s Weather Program Office. While the UFS-R2O Project has a two-year lifetime, the work on the 3- to 5-year vision starts immediately so that the pipeline of innovations that can be transitioned to operations is continuously fed. The project priorities are drawn from both forecaster requirements and the latest scientific developments.

The UFS-R2O Project annual meeting will be a working meeting to evaluate the progress of the first year of effort and discuss plans for the 2nd year and a possible extension to year 3. The meeting will determine what is and is not working and make plans for the next phase of the Project. In particular, while the first year of effort was largely engaged in engineering the modeling systems, the Project will transition to pre-implementation testing and tuning and a scientific evaluation of the performance, including biases, of the global and regional forecast applications. A high priority for the annual meeting is planning for efficient organization of year-2 activities and developing the priorities for a potential year-3. The meeting will include discussions of how best to integrate with other projects, funded by NOAA through Notices of Funding Opportunity and Hurricane Supplemental allocations, and with NOAA’s new Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC). The annual meeting will also include discussions of how to accelerate the transition to the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) and other challenges, including planning for more rigorous testing of (ensemble) prototypes, computing resource limitations, code retirement, and coordination across application teams on verification, validation and workflow concerns.

Breakout & Focal Discussion Sessions

During the UFS R2O annual meeting, a series of focused focal discussion and breakout sessions will take place. 

Participants

UFS R2O PIs and developers; and UFS community members as needed. 

If you are interested in participating in any of the sessions, contact us at ufs-r2o-engineers@noaa.gov and see below for more information. 

Focal Discussion Sessions

Discussion Session 1. Transition to JEDI, HPC constraints, and priorities for Year 3 (Kleist)

1. How to accelerate transition to JEDI?
2. How to mitigate HPC resource constraints for production of Coupled Reanalysis?
3. What science advancements should we focus on in year 3? 

Discussion Session 2. Repositories/Public Releases/Community Support- the relationship of EPIC to UFS-R2O project and UFS development (discussion facilitated by the CCI Team Leads) (Dunlap, Jensen, Wolff)

Discussion Session 3. Integration of other projects (EPIC, NOFOs, S2S, and HSUPs) in the UFS R2O (TBD)

Objective: To discuss the potential integration of sufficiently mature and relevant for UFS R2O, NOFO/WPO/JTTI/HSUP/DSUP projects into the UFS R2O applications during year 3 of the project.

Additional information for Discussion 3:

PIs of projects funded through the aforementioned programs have been invited to participate and are encouraged to prepare two slide presentations on their projects.

• PIs intended to present are kindly requested to register here by Thursday, July 8, 2021. If your name is not included in this list (updated on 2021/07/08 at 12:15), you are not currently registered as presenter.
• It is recommended that the presentation be focused on the main achievements, the readiness level, and according to the PIs' perspective, the next steps towards incorporating their work.
• Email your slides to stylianos.flampouris@noaa.gov by COB July 13, 2021.

Breakout Sessions 

Objective of Breakout Sessions: To identify the remaining issues for each application, and the needed testing strategy to efficiently address those given the T2O timeline and HPC constraints.

Breakout 1. Testing strategies -single component vs. fully coupled, forecasts vs. long climate runs, when to involve cycled DA (Yang)

Breakout 2. Evaluation strategies (Stan)

Breakout 3. Ensemble testing - stochastic physics and integration with DA (Pegion)