Informal Seminar: Current Status and Future Plans for Operational Data Assimilation at NCEP

NOAA is currently in the process of leveraging the broader enterprise and community modeling capabilities to enhance future operational applications. NCEP is currently working with collaborators to develop applications based on the Unified Forecast System, a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth system modeling capability. This presentation will highlight efforts underway to continue to upgrade the current operational systems, activities related to building unified data assimilation for UFS applications based on the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI), and plans for priorities over the next decade.

NCEP is in the final stages of a planned upgrade of the operational Global Data Assimilation System in late November 2022 to improve the utilization of some observations. Beyond this upgrade, plans for GFSv17 include incorporating the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) v13 and implementation of a coupled model which will require (weakly) coupled data assimilation capabilities. Details regarding plans for the transition to coupled data assimilation and implementation of Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) components will be presented, including progress on the use of JEDI for marine, land, and atmospheric composition data assimilation. Separately, work is underway for a prototype hourly-updating global system with overlapping assimilation windows as a potential addition to future operational applications. Initial results and potential implications will be discussed. Finally, progress and plans for other UFS based applications such as the Rapid Refresh Forecast System, Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, and the 3D Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis will be presented.