The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) attended the 104th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting from January 27 to February 1, 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland and engaged the community in a number of EPIC ways. The Annual Meeting provides a forum for the community to share ideas and experiences on the research and development of Earth system models and their applications in operational forecasting.
EPIC kicked off the week on Saturday, January 27 by hosting the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) Workshop: Building, Configuring, and Running the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short-Range Weather (SRW) App in the Cloud (Hybrid). This event, which was led by Dr. Natalie Perlin (EPIC/Redline), taught students:
- How to clone (copy) the UFS SRW App from GitHub onto the cloud.
- How to build the various code bases that the App uses.
- How to run the provided example configuration.
The AMS Meeting in Baltimore marked the third year of the Symposium on Community Modeling and Innovation (3CMI), an initiative spearheaded by the UFS Steering Committee co-chairs and community members from the Weather Enterprise in collaboration with the EPIC Program. Program chairs leading the 3CMI Symposium—Dr. Neil Jacobs (UFS/UCAR), Dr. Louisa Nance (DTC/NCAR), Dr. Hendrik Tolman (NOAA/NWS/OSTI), and Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves (NOAA/OAR/WPO/EPIC)— kicked off the event on Monday, January 29, 2024.
This year’s 3CMI Symposium featured two sessions dedicated to the Weather Program Office (WPO) 2023 Innovation Projects, a NOAA initiative to nurture community projects that can benefit from the EPIC software infrastructure to accelerate the transition of scientific innovations to operational weather applications. One of the Symposium highlights was a panel discussion focusing on Earth system modeling governance and community building. The panel featured Dr. Michael Morgan, NOAA Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction, and Nicholas Anderson, Director of the Physical and Dynamic Meteorology Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), who discussed opportunities for NOAA-NSF partnerships and upcoming challenges and opportunities involving Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) applications. In the same session, the EPIC Program Manager, Maoyi Huang (NOAA/OAR/WPO/EPIC), shared the stage with program managers from the UK MetOffice to announce the establishment of the Transatlantic Data Science Academy, an initiative that will focus on student training and exchanges of experts through courses and opportunities to learn earth observation sector skills, such as data processing and data analysis.
The 3CMI Symposium included five other scientific sessions over three days, covering topics such as research-to-operations transitions, open innovation, fire weather, community modeling infrastructure, advanced data assimilation, post-processing, and model verification.
Throughout the week, EPIC conducted continuous community engagement on the exhibit floor with a dedicated station at the RTX booth that involved a set of revolving presentation slides, tours of the EPIC website, and even a live demo of the UFS Land Data Assimilation system by Dr. Natalie Perlin. In addition, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Keven Blackman (EPIC/Raytheon) presented on the UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application at the AWS booth.
The NOAA booth presentation on Wednesday, January 31 and the 2024 AMS EPIC Town Hall on Thursday, February 1 showcased updates from NOAA WPO, including its new organizational structure (implemented in Fall 2023); grants and funding opportunities supported by various WPO programs; and their contributions in advancing the nation’s observations, modeling, and predictive capability at all relevant time scales. The EPIC Team highlighted success stories demonstrating progress in areas of community building and modeling infrastructure that will enable innovations. The team also discussed EPIC’s future plans to clarify research-to-operations and operations-to-research pathways, to advance data assimilation science and innovation under the UFS framework, and to train next-generation Earth system modeling and DA scientists.
We would like to thank everyone from the UFS community who participated in the AMS Annual Meeting! In particular, we would like to recognize the following members of the EPIC Team and the UFS community for their contributions at AMS:
- EPIC Workshop: Dr. Natalie Perlin, Gillian Petro (EPIC/STC), Brian Weir (EPIC/Raytheon), Jessica Wheeler (EPIC/ISYS), Aaron Jones (EPIC/Raytheon), and Keven Blackman.
- EPIC Presentations: Keven Blackman, Zach Shrader (EPIC/Raytheon), Eddie Snyder (EPIC/Raytheon), Brian Weir, Aaron Jones, and Christina Holt (NOAA/GSL)
- Poster Sessions: Got Code? Join the UFS Community! by Dr. Hendrik Tolman and Unified Workflow Tools: An Agile Approach to Developing a Configuration Toolbox, by Naureen Bharwani (NOAA/GSL), Emily Carpenter (NOAA/GSL), Christina Holt, Fredrick Gabelmann (EPIC/Element 84), Paul Madden (NOAA/GSL), and Brian Weir.
- NOAA Booth Presentation: John Ten Hoeve (NOAA/OAR/WPO), Dr. Jessie Carman (NOAA/OAR/WPO), Dr. Maoyi Huang, Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves, Dr. Krishna Kumar (NOAA/OAR/WPO/EPIC), Jan Ising (NOAA/OAR/WPO/EPIC), Jennifer Vogt (NOAA/OAR/WPO/EPIC), and Chris Domanti (EPIC/Raytheon).
- RTX Booth Presentation and Demonstration: Aaron Jones, Natalie Perlin, Brian Weir, Eddie Snyder, Keven Blackman, Chris Domanti.
- EPIC Town Hall: John Ten Hoeve, Dr. Jessie Carman, Dr. Maoyi Huang, Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves, Dr. Krishna Kumar, Jennifer Vogt, Jan Ising, and Keven Blackman.
Throughout the week, we continued to hear perspectives from our partners and discussed further collaboration opportunities with them. The event was considered an overwhelming success! The team is looking forward to hosting our next big event, the Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop (UIFCW) at Jackson State University (Jackson, MS) from July 22 to July 26, 2024, and we enthusiastically anticipate our return to the 105th AMS Annual Meeting next year!
