Bipartisan Infrastructure Law summary: “Shall be for research supercomputing infrastructure used for weather and climate model development to improve drought, flood, and wildfire prediction, detection, and forecasting.”

NOAA generates tremendous value for the Nation—and the world—by advancing our ability to understand and anticipate changes in the Earth’s environment, improving society’s ability to make scientifically informed decisions, and by conserving and managing ocean and coastal ecosystems and resources. 

All of this data that NOAA collects in its Earth observations require storage devices, advanced data communications, hardware and software engineering services, security, and necessary data center space. High performance computing allows scientists to use that calculating power to produce more accurate ocean, air quality, and environmental models. NOAA’s research enterprise HPC assets are critical to meeting our ability to deliver NOAA’s future and, ultimately, to provide the products and services required by the American public.

This plan will expand high performance computing and archive resources, and provide modernization of software infrastructure. Modern facilities increase capacity for efficient calculations and add computational power in response to growing needs. The additional computing capacity will be used for weather and climate model development to improve drought, flood, and wildfire prediction, detection, and forecasting. 

 $80M in FY 2022

• Funding will likely be distributed internally, therefore no external funding opportunity is expected at this time.