2024 NOAA Air Quality Forecasters Focus Group Workshop
October 9-10, 2024

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS), under its air quality program, the National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC), hosted the annual Air Quality Forecasters’ Focus Group Workshop on October 9-10, 2024. The NAQFC develops and implements operational air quality (AQ) prediction models to provide AQ forecast guidance for forecasters employed by local and state agencies. These agencies disseminate the AQ forecasts through the EPA’s AirNow program and AQ alerts through NWS Forecast Offices. This annual workshop provides a unique opportunity for AQ forecasters to learn more about the forecast guidance they receive from NOAA and the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC). At the same time, it provides a forum for forecasters to share targeted feedback and insights with model developers and AQ researchers from NOAA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), academia, and MSC. The workshop was conducted in a hybrid format that accommodated 122 registered participants, including 32 in-person attendees and AQ forecasters from 26 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the Saginaw Chippawa Tribe of Michigan. The two-day session included 30 formal presentations (10 from state and local forecasters) and wide-ranging discussions. Outcomes from the workshop included identification of strengths and weaknesses in NOAA’s operational AQ prediction models, a list of user requests for specific forecast-guidance enhancements, and a strategy to better align NOAA’s development plans with forecaster needs.
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2024 NOAA Subseasonal and Seasonal Applications Workshop Summary
Sept 4-6th, 2024

The 2024 NOAA Subseasonal and Seasonal Applications Workshop took place in College Park, MD at the NOAA Center for Climate and Weather Prediction (NCWCP) on September 4th-6th, 2024. The first iteration of this annual hybrid workshop hosted 330 registered participants (in-person and virtual) from the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) research-to-operations (R2O), forecaster, and stakeholder communities across the globe and featured 87 oral presentations and 45 posters. The primary objective of the workshop was to promote the advancement of the subseasonal Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFSv13) and the development of a new Seasonal Forecast System (SFSv1). Through a community modeling approach, NOAA seeks to develop these systems by fostering collaboration among model developers, users/stakeholders, and researchers in the public, private, and academic sectors. To that end, this workshop sought to identify essential points of engagement and collaboration across the S2S community and further delineate critically needed yet undersupported research and development endeavors. Ultimately, these collaborative efforts will guide and inform the formation of best practices and strategies in the development and implementation of operational S2S forecast systems.

The three-day workshop provided a collaborative forum across eight sessions of oral presentations and poster presentations to address and further discuss key areas of inquiry, development, and innovation within the S2S applications community. The addressed topics encompassed: stakeholder requirements and needs for NOAA’s S2S applications; forecaster’s priorities in improving NOAA’s S2S applications; systematic model errors in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) and other S2S systems with experiences/insights in improving S2S modeling systems; best practices in initializing seasonal forecasts; process-level diagnostics tools and verification metrics; advancements in the development and implementation of GEFSv13; updates in Unified Forecast System (UFS) component models; the SFS Development Plan and early results in the development of SFSv1; and avenues for community engagement and contributions to GEFS and SFS development including the implementation of ML/AI methods to supplement physics-based methods for NOAA’s S2S Applications. Following the conclusion of those sessions, a panel of subject matter experts across the S2S applications community presented their feedback on and critiques of the current SFS Development Plan. Following the panel’s presentations, the workshop organizers opened up a live community-style discussion forum for the workshop participants to supplement the panel’s SFS Development Plan feedback and critiques. Lastly, the workshop participants, session co-chairs, and organizers collected and summarized the key findings from the workshop on a session-by-session basis and presented them in a format that addressed the current trajectory of SFS development and provided critical feedback aimed at charting a path forward that ensures that the next steps of SFS development and future implementation are viable, agile, and pragmatic.

Before the conclusion of the workshop, the organizers and session co-chairs acknowledged the first, second, and third place winners of the workshop’s Early Career Research Poster Contest. All early career workshop participants who presented a poster were eligible to participate in this contest, and the awardees were selected by a workshop attendee popular vote. The Early Career Research Poster Contest awardees for this year’s workshop were Jingxuan Cui - Colorado State University (Third Place) for “Diagnostics of Oceanic Kelvin Wave Responses to Westerly Wind Events in the equatorial Pacific in CMIP6 models”, John Hammond - USGS Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Water Science Center (Second Place) for “Developing Early Warning Forecasts of Hydrological Drought Onset, Duration, and Intensity Across the Conterminous United States Using Machine Learning Models”, and Pengfei Shi - PNNL (First Place) for “The 4DEnVar-based weakly coupled land data assimilation for E3SM”.

Overall, this workshop proved to be a great success in its inaugural iteration and opened up multiple avenues of engagement across the S2S community that will set the stage for future advancements in NOAA’s S2S forecasting capabilities and readiness to address the ever evolving needs of model users and stakeholders alike.
View the presentations and recordings

A successful inaugural HAFS Summer Colloquium!
May 28-30, 2024
The first ever Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) and NOAA Center for Atmospheric Science and Meteorology (NCAS-M) HAFS Summer Colloquium was held from May 28-30, 2024 at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP) in College Park, MD. Jointly organized by NCAS-M, NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), this colloquium was attended by graduate students and postdoctoral scientists from Minority Serving Institutions (MSI), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and other university members of the NCAS-M consortium. The three-day colloquium featured talks and presentations covering the scientific basics of hurricanes and methods in numerical weather prediction (NWP). Detailed examples and exercises were focused on the operational Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS), which is NOAA’s new coupled atmosphere-ocean-wave model based on the Unified Forecast System (UFS), and suitable for tropical cyclone (TC) research and forecasting in all global ocean basins.

The talks were interspersed with hands-on tutorials and live training sessions for the students, given by the leaders of HAFS development to help develop the skills of students from traditionally underrepresented communities and prepare them for potential opportunities in the future to use or contribute development to HAFS. All participating students were able to run multiple test cases of HAFS with different levels of complexity and study the results. The Colloquium was a resounding success, resulting in approximately 15 new users and developers who have the skills to employ HAFS for their educational and research goals. Additionally, the event exercised new processes to distribute HAFS software, test cases and training materials which will be used to broaden the HAFS community and enable future innovations into NOAA operations. Congratulations to EMC, AOML, UFS-HAFS Application Team members, NCAS-M, and all of the students, for making this a productive and successful event!
Read more on the meetings’ major actions and takeaways

2023 Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program Annual Meeting
Nov 14-17, 2023
The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) annual meeting took place in Miami, FL, November 14th through the 17th. The meeting hosted 144 participants from the HFIP community spanning the public, private, and academic sectors, as well as international partners. The primary objective of the annual meeting is to discuss the current operational  Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFSv1) assessments, current and future hurricane modeling and product development activities, and update key HFIP strategic priorities.

The meeting discussed early results & lessons learned from real-time developmental experiment results for future upgrades to HAFS. In 2023 hurricane season, HAFSv1 has demonstrated superior track and intensity forecast skills over HWRF, with track forecast skill improved by more than 15% from days 2-5, and intensity forecast skill by ~10-20% from days 3-5 for storms within the National Hurricane Center (NHC) area of responsibility. While having two operational variants of HAFS, HAFS-A and HAFS-B, provided some insight as to forecast uncertainty, the results from 2023 demonstrate that a full HAFS ensemble will be necessary to adequately quantify uncertainty.  This information will be used to inform and outline the work required to progress HAFS toward multiple high-resolution moving storm-centric nests across all global basins, anticipated in 2027. For the first time in the history of the HFIP annual meeting, presentations from an emergency manager and a cruise line meteorologist provided additional context as to how significantly local government and private industry have benefitted from HFIP, while also providing additional context as to how the National Weather Service (NWS) can better tailor forecast products and services to a broader set of users.

The collaboration at the annual meeting, along with the presented data will foster developing efficient pathways forward to progressing a world-leading, reliable, and skillful model guidance on TC track and intensity (including rapid intensification), storm size, genesis, storm surge, rainfall, and tornadoes associated with TCs and Socio-Economic impacts. Additional objectives include further development of ideas to be included in the new 2025 HFIP Strategic Plan with revised 5-year and 10-year goals. These goals will focus on advancing forecast and communication of all hazards from TCs, incorporate risk communication research to create more effective watches & warnings, and produce improved probabilistic risk products with a focus on vulnerable communities and industries through the use of social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Lastly, a variety of approaches were discussed at the annual meeting as to how to further enhance the role of HAFS as the UFS Hurricane Application while fostering even deeper integration of ideas and potential from other aspects of the larger UFS community both inside and outside of tropical meteorology. Overall, the annual meeting proved to be a great success through contributions from many across and beyond the HFIP community, summarizing the highly successful history of the program, and setting the stage for a realigned focus for HFIP over the next 10 years.
Read more on the meetings’ major actions and takeaways, and view the presentations

OSTI-M and NAQFC hosted the 2023 Air Quality Forecasters’ Focus Group Workshop
October 12-13, 2023
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service (NOAA/NWS), under its air quality program, the National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC), hosted the annual Air Quality Forecasters’ Focus Group Workshop on October 12-13, 2023. The NAQFC develops and implements operational air quality (AQ) prediction models to provide AQ forecast guidance for forecasters employed by local and state agencies. These agencies disseminate the forecasts to the public through NWS Forecast Offices and other outlets. This annual workshop provides a unique opportunity for AQ forecasters to share their experiences as end users of model guidance with model developers and AQ researchers from NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). The purpose of the workshop is to review assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the AQ model guidance, examine current model development and research initiatives, and use forecaster feedback to identify gaps and/or misalignment between model performance, current R D initiatives, and forecasters’ needs.
The workshop was conducted in a hybrid format, with 76 total participants, including 24 in-person attendees. Representatives from each agency presented strategic perspectives and individual capabilities and performance assessments. Outcomes from the workshop included a list of user needs for specific forecast-guidance enhancements and development plans for known NOAA model deficiencies.
Read the full meeting summary here

NOAA launches new hurricane forecast model as Atlantic season starts strong
July 13, 2023
NOAA’s National Hurricane Center — a division of the National Weather Service — has a new model to help produce hurricane forecasts this season. The Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP), a partnership across NOAA's NWS, OAR, and other line offices and community partners developed The Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS) model which was put into operations on June 27 and will run alongside existing models for the 2023 season before replacing them as NOAA’s premier hurricane forecasting model. "The quick deployment of HAFS marks a milestone in NOAA's commitment to advancing our hurricane forecasting capabilities, and ensuring continued improvement of services to the American public," said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. "Development, testing and evaluations were jointly carried out between scientists at NOAA Research and the National Weather Service, marking a seamless transition from development to operations.”
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The Office of Science and Technology Modeling Program (OSTI-M) hosted an EMC Review
June 6-8, 2023
The Office of Science and Technology Modeling Program (OSTI-M) hosted an EMC Review at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP) in College Park, Maryland. The review assessed EMC's operations and short- and long-term plans, as well as their alignment with NCEP's strategic plan and UFS's strategic plan. The review covered EMC's activities over the last several years (2019-2022)

AGU Editor’s highlight on a recent article by UFS-R2O MRW/S2S Team
March 2023
The National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Environmental Modeling Center (NCEP, EMC) scientist and UFS-R2O participant Dr. Yuejian Zhu’s article on quantifying forecast uncertainty in the latest coupled global ensemble system at the NCEP, is featured under AGU’s Editor’s Highlights in the February issue of Eos. Dr. Zhu’s article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres shows that the new atmosphere-land-ocean-ice-waves coupled system, built on top of its uncoupled predecessor, Global Ensemble Forecast System version 12 (GEFSv12), has improved skill at various forecast leads, making it a major milestone for the operational ensemble system at the NCEP.
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