Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) team members attended the 103rd American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting from January 8-12, 2023 in Denver, CO 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.
The week kicked off on Saturday, January 8, 2023 with the EPIC Short Course: Running the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Short-Range Weather Application (SRW) in the Cloud. This event taught students
- how to access the EPIC Sandbox via Amazon Web Services (AWS) using their local devices and
- how to set up and use the SRW Application.
Dr. Natalie Perlin and Mike Kavulich (DTC/NCAR) led participants through a control case and two modified test cases to produce three different forecast outputs and associated forecast graphics plots. Following the short course, the same team led a workshop on Building the SRW Application in Containers and on Bare-Metal Systems. This workshop focused on how to build the SRW Application starting with a Singularity container that has pre-installed SRW App source code and spack-stack software libraries. Each course was attended by about 20 participants!
The AMS Meeting in Denver marked the second year of the Symposium on Community Modeling and Innovation (2CMI), an initiative spearheaded by the UFS Steering Committee co-chairs and community members for the Weather Enterprise in collaboration with the EPIC Program. Program chairs leading the 2CMI Symposium—Dr. Neil Jacobs (UFS/UCAR), Dr. Louisa Nance (DTC/NCAR), Dr. Hendrik Tolman (OSTI/NWS/NOAA), and Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves (EPIC/OAR/NOAA), —kicked off the event on Tuesday, January 10, 2023.
They welcomed presentations and a panel discussion about community modeling, EPIC, and public-private partnerships with participation from Ms. Mary Erickson (Deputy Director of the National Weather Service), Dr. Neil Jacobs (Chief Science Advisor for the UFS), Dr. Luke Peffers (Chief Weather Officer at Tomorrow.io), Dr. Dorothy Koch (Director of NOAA’s Weather Program Office), Dr. Steven Thur (NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Assistant Administrator), and Mr. Keven Blackman (Chief Engineer for the EPIC Contract).
The opening 2CMI presentations and panel were followed by nine scientific sessions over two days, covering topics such as research-to-operations transitions, open innovation, fire weather, community modeling infrastructure, advanced data assimilation, post-processing, and model verification.
Two AMS 2023 town halls on Monday, January 10th, 2023, highlighted EPIC and UFS achievements and future plans. At noon, the EPIC Town Hall featured Dr. Michael Morgan, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observations and Predictions, who provided opening remarks about the future of Earth system predictions and EPIC’s role in advancing those predictions. The EPIC Town Hall went on to highlight recent progress in the NOAA EPIC Program to accelerate the transition of innovative research and development into operational numerical weather prediction systems.
Later in the day, the UFS Modeling Forum covered general progress made with the UFS both for research and operations and focused on the Innovation/Research to Operations process and on strategies for bridging gaps in the UFS.
We would like to thank everyone from the UFS community who participated in the 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. Mark Potts, Dr. Natalie Perlin, Mandy Parson, Jessica Wheeler, Mike Kavulich (DTC/NCAR), and Keven Blackman
- EPIC Presentations: Dr. Stelios Flampouris, Keven Blackman, Zach Shrader, and Mandy Parson
- EPIC Town Halls: Dr. Dorothy Koch, Dr. Brian Gross, Dr. Maoyi Huang, Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves, Dr. Krishna Kumar, Keven Blackman, Leah Dubots, and Jennifer Vogt
- EPIC Poster Session on the WPO Innovation for Next Generation Scientists (WINGS) Dissertation Fellowship: Leah Dubots, Dr. Maoyi Huang, Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves, Dr. Krishna Kumar, Jennifer Vogt, Dr. Cindy Bruyere (UCAR), Hanne Mauriello (UCAR), Julie Cross (UCAR), Whitney Robinson (UCAR)
- NOAA Booth Presentations: Dr. Maoyi Huang, Dr. Jose-Henrique Alves, Dr. Krishna Kumar, Leah Dubots, Jennifer Vogt, Keven Blackman, and Chris Domanti
- Raytheon Technologies Booth Presentation/Demonstration: Zach Shrader, Keven Blackman, Chris Domanti
Throughout the week, we heard a lot of buzz about EPIC, and the event was considered an all-around success! The team is looking forward to hosting our next big event, the Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop (UIFCW) in July, and we enthusiastically anticipate our return to the 104th AMS Annual Meeting next year!
