Infrastructure

 

EMC's mission is to maintain, enhance and transition-to-operations numerical systems for weather, ocean, climate, land surface and hydrology, hurricanes, and air quality for the Nation and the global community and for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the economy.  A vital part of this mission is to develop and maintain common architecture and software infrastructure. These software packages can be divided several categories : (1) Numerical forecast model infrastructure, (2) Software for simulating various physical processes (such as land-surface physics), (3) Software to process external input to NCEP's Systems (such as observational data processing), and (4) commonly shared Fortran and C++ libraries.

 

FV3GFS

In 2017 the NOAA GFDL Finite Volume Cubed Sphere (FV3) dynamical core was selected for the new NCEP atmospheric model at both global and regional scales. FV3 dynamical core implementation includes incorporating FV3 into NEMS, and developing advanced physics and data assimilation techniques to match or exceed the skill of operational Global Forecast System (GFS), and to transition NCEP's mesoscale modeling suite to use FV3. In addition, NWS is working with federal partners, universities, and the community to create a fully accessible FV3-based community model. FV3GFS has a Vlab Community page

 

  • Observational Data Processing
    Most of the observational data at NCEP are stored in WMO BUFR format. This format is an international standard and provides an efficient means for transferring data. In addition it allows for great flexibility for adding new observation elements.
  • NOAH-Land Surface
    Noah-LSM is the land-surface physics component of NCEP's operational models, developed in collaboration with the Oregon State Dept of Atmospheric Science, AFWA/AFRL, and the NOAA Office of Hydrology.
  • NOAA Environmental Modeling System
    NEMS is a shared, portable, high performance software superstructure and infrastructure for use in operational prediction models at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)
  • Weather Research and Forecast
    The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction system designed for both atmospheric research and operational forecasting applications.
  • NCEP Common Software (NCEPLIBS)
    An integral part of the NCEP production suite is a collection of 20+ libraries developed at NCEP plus versions of the 3rd party libraries (such as NetCDF, ESMF, Jasper, XML, etc). The NCEPLIBS group leads the effort to provide the most up-to-date versions for research and operational use.
  • Implementation Standards/Environmental Equivalence
    Implementation Standards outline policies and technical standards that must be met in order to implement numerical systems in NCEP's Production Suite. The coding standards, examples of operational-quality scripts and code, and best practices presented have been established to enable operational stability, efficient troubleshooting and improved environmental equivalence.
  • Unified Forecast System
    The Unified Forecast Systems (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. The UFS numerical applications span local to global domains and predictive time scales from sub-hourly analyses to seasonal predictions. It is designed to support the Weather Enterprise and to be the source system for NOAA's operational numerical weather prediction applications.