Who We Are
EPIC is a collaboration within the Weather Enterprise — government, industry, and academia — to improve weather forecasting systems. It is being spearheaded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with its contracting partner, Raytheon.
The devastating impacts of hazardous weather and other environmental events on life, property, and the national economy can be mitigated with accurate and reliable forecasts that are clearly communicated to decision-makers. However, the ongoing success of the nation’s forecasting tools depends on continuous and sustained contributions to scientific research and modeling from across the weather enterprise. EPIC unites those in government, industry, and academia, which opens simultaneous opportunities to improve NOAA’s operational modeling systems; serve others in the community; fund research, modeling, and compute initiatives; and develop innovative tools and applications. NOAA embraced these opportunities by advancing the Unified Forecast System (UFS), the source system for NOAA‘s operational numerical weather prediction applications, as a community model.
With our EPIC community partner, Raytheon, we are joining forces with the community for the benefit of the nation. The new model development community has transitioned the UFS code to Github and is supporting code managers for the UFS applications and component models. EPIC will continue to build upon these community partnerships to foster innovation, advancing research innovations into NOAA’s operational systems.
Find out more about us and our community!
Our Community
The EPIC Program Team
A dedicated team of scientists, communicators, and project managers, the EPIC Program Team strives to achieve the highest quality results by adopting agile practices and creating a work environment based on fairness, integrity, transparency, accountability, viability, collaboration, attribution, and effectiveness.
The EPIC Contract Team
Raytheon and its partners are bringing proven expertise in scientific leadership, software engineering, software infrastructure, and delivery of support services to government, academia, and industry researchers who will collaborate within the EPIC framework.
The UFS Teams Powered by EPIC
EPIC’s collaborations unite community partners, resources, and expertise with EPIC’s resources and expertise to support scientific research and modeling within EPIC’s project management structure. This effort promotes scientific leadership, software development, and service delivery. It is funded jointly between EPIC and its collaborating community partners across government, academia, and industry. By driving innovation and strategic resource use, EPIC seeks to boost predictive capabilities and deliver lasting value through partnerships.
Academia
EPIC’s approach will bring greater alignment between NOAA, academia, and research centers by removing boundaries and expanding avenues for cooperation.
Students
As the next generation of Earth systems scientists, students will compose a significant portion of the user base. EPIC must leverage the diverse talents of students across the Nation to accelerate research to operations.
Private Industry
Large swaths of the economy — from transportation, to agriculture, to retail — will benefit from EPIC’s support to NOAA’s products and services. EPIC’s contributions also have the potential to bolster emerging economic industries, such as commercial space and aquaculture.
Government
EPIC will facilitate, enable, and support community model development using a continuous improvement approach and a development environment that prioritizes research and operational modeling with an engaged community of government partners.
