Created from within NOAA’s community of scientists, communicators, project managers, and system engineers, the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) team strives to achieve the highest quality results by creating an agile and principled work environment based on fairness, integrity, transparency, accountability, viability, collaboration, attribution, and effectiveness.
Fairness and integrity means setting clear rules to follow using transparent and objective evidence-based decisions.
Transparency means sharing everything. This includes open meetings, detailed minutes posted within ten days, open elections, and dynamic documentation.
Accountability means responsibility to funders and beneficiaries.
Viability means creating long-term value.
Collaboration means balancing the tensions between competing and cooperating.
Attribution means giving credit for organizational and individual efforts.
Effectiveness is the best, prioritized use of human, technological, financial, and environmental resources, which will be evaluated annually.
Maoyi Huang, Ph.D., joined the NOAA Weather Program Office (WPO) in August 2021 as the EPIC Program Manager. Prior to WPO, she was the COASTAL Act Program Manager and the lead of land, water, coastal, and cross-cutting infrastructure program areas with the National Weather Service Office of Science and Technology Integration’s Modeling Programs Division. Her scientific expertise lies in understanding the complex multiscale interactions of terrestrial hydrological and ecological processes using an Earth system modeling approach through model development, applications, analysis, and model-data integration. She has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Prior to joining NOAA, Maoyi was a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory from 2010-2020, where she was responsible for proposal development, scientific and software developments, project management, reporting, and review for projects funded by Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the United States Geological Survey. She was a research assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 2008-2009 and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Global Ecology at Carnegie Institution for Science from 2005-2008. She earned her master’s and doctorate in civil and environmental engineering in 2001 and 2005 from the University of California at Berkeley.
V. Krishna Kumar, Ph.D., is a contractor providing technical support and oversight as the EPIC Program Coordinator and Senior Program Scientist. Krishna is the Project Technical Coordinator and Manager for multiple EPIC-funded projects such as JCSDA, UFS-R2O, OAR Cloud Incubator, and Unified Forecast System (UFS) infrastructure projects. Krishna has 28 years of combined operational and research experience in numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, model diagnostics and verification, tropical (monsoon) meteorology and climate studies, software development and engineering, project and contract management, research to operations to research (R2O2R), and high performance computing at premier research and operational centers in the U.S. and India.
Prior to joining NOAA’s Weather Program Office, Krishna was Project Manager and Senior Research Scientist at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)/STAR, supporting the Research & Technology Maturation for the Exploitation of Emerging Technologies Project.
Krishna obtained a doctorate in meteorology from the Physical Research Laboratory, Department of Space in India; a Master of Science in Meteorology from the University of Cochin, India; and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Calicut, India. He spent 5 years as a National Research Council Fellow and Contract Scientist at the Climate & Radiation Branch of NASA/GSFC from 1993-1998. Krishna has authored and co-authored several peer-reviewed articles and conference publications in American Meteorological Society and international journals. He has also acted as a reviewer to many weather and climate journals both domestically and internationally. Krishna mentored multiple Howard University summer student interns at the NOAA Center for Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS) and served as a visiting faculty member for the NCAS Program at Howard University, where he taught Dynamic Meteorology classes.
José-Henrique Alves, Ph.D., is a physical oceanographer supporting the development of EPIC at the Weather Program Office, NOAA Research division (WPO/OAR). José-Henrique is the federal Project Manager for the EPIC contract.
Before joining the EPIC Team, José-Henrique worked for nearly 20 years leading the wave model development efforts at the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). He pioneered a model development approach uniting forecasters’ requirements with the latest scientific knowledge, leveraging partnerships built from within the community-driven WAVEWATCH III model framework. In collaboration with the U.S. Navy, José-Henrique established the first multi-center wave ensemble system globally, which significantly improved the skill of wave guidance products available to the National Weather Service and the public.
Working with American and international scientists following a community modeling approach, he implemented the first operational wave modeling system at NCEP using unstructured meshes serving the North American Great Lakes. More recently, José-Henrique led the EMC wave group to build the wave model components in the GFSv16 and GEFSv12 global forecast systems. These are the first two operational implementations of the UFS.
José-Henrique has a doctorate in physical oceanography from the University of New South Wales (Australia), a master’s in environmental engineering from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), and a Bachelor of Science in Oceanography from the Rio de Janeiro State University (Brazil).
Jennifer Vogt is a contractor currently supporting the NOAA/OAR/WPO EPIC program as the EPIC Project Coordinator.
Prior to joining WPO, Jennifer worked as a National Weather Service (NWS) Meteorologist for just over 7 years at Weather Forecast Offices located in Albany, NY and Jackson, KY. During this time, she gained valuable experience with severe storms, winter weather, and hydrology. Outside of forecasting, Jennifer thrived working and building relationships with NWS’s core partners through Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS) as well as within her leadership roles as a Regional Coordinator for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), Weather-Ready Nation Team Co-Lead, and local office Webmaster. Jennifer is an expert in satellite imagery analysis through her experience working with the Satellite Analysis Branch of the National Environmental and Satellite Data Information Service.
Jennifer earned her master’s in atmospheric science from the University of Wyoming (2010) and her bachelor’s in meteorology from Millersville University of Pennsylvania (2007).
Jennifer is a health and wellness coach through Beachbody where she loves to help others live a healthier lifestyle. She also enjoys running and plans on running her first marathon next year.
Jan Ising is the Data Assimilation Consortium Manager supporting the Data Assimilation Consortium project in WPO’s Earth System Research and Modeling division. Prior to joining the WPO, Jan worked in the private sector as a Lead Numerical Modeling Scientist. His expertise lies in numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, model verification, fire weather, and GIS.
Jan holds a B.S in Meteorology and a minor in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a M.S in Physics with a focus on Atmospheric Science from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and a graduate certificate in Geographic Information Systems from North Carolina State University. For his Masters thesis, Jan investigated the Effects of Density Current, Diurnal Heating, and Local Terrain on the Mesoscale Environment Conducive to the Yarnell Hill Fire out of which came 2 publications in peer reviewed journals. In his previous role, Jan worked with a GPU-accelerated numerical weather prediction model. Jan led, developed and investigated workflows and customer projects for fire weather, data assimilation, and model verification. In his free time, Jan enjoys snowboarding, amateur weather photography, and spending time with family.
Accelerating
innovation
through
community
modeling
Accelerating
innovation
through
community
modeling
The Earth Prediction Innovation Center will enable the most accurate and reliable operational numerical weather prediction system in the world.
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