Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) has the responsibility to provide weather, water, and climate information to protect life and property, and enhance the national economy. The NWS mission is to provide the best possible guidance to a wide variety of customers, including emergency managers, forecasters, and the aviation community

The NWS R2O Initiative is expanding and accelerating critical weather forecasting research to operation to address growing service demands, and increase the accuracy of weather forecasts through accelerated development and implementation of current global weather prediction models, improved data assimilation techniques, and improved software architecture and system engineering. The new unified coupled model system will have the flexibility and capability to implement model component improvements as they are developed.

The NWS Research to Operations (R2O) initiative's five year plan is to upgrade the current operational Global Forecast System (GFS) to run as a unified, fully coupled Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) within NEMS (NOAA Environmental Modeling System) infrastructure. Using advanced high performance computing architectures, the system will incorporate the most recent advances in weather prediction modeling from NOAA and the research community.

• Implement a weather-scale, fully-coupled NWP System
• Extend forecast skill beyond 8 to 10 days
• Improve hurricane track and intensity forecast
• Extend weather forecasting to 30 days