Capability Announcement: UFS-DA Diagnostics Toolkit v1.0
NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), National Weather Service (NWS)’s Office of Modeling and Development (OMD), and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Community Global Workflow (GW) v1.0.0 (https://github.com/NOAA-EMC/global-workflow). This is the first time EPIC is releasing the Community GW framework, which provides an end‑to‑end workflow designed to run global configurations of medium range numerical weather forecasting for the UFS-Weather Model (WM). It is built to support both research and operational implementations. The Community GW v1.0.0 release can be used on NOAA HPC systems, National Science Foundation (NSF) / National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Derecho, and native Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, enabling broad accessibility for the UFS community.
Nested-EAGLE Application v1.1.0 Release
The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the NOAA Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Numerical Weather Prediction (AI4NWP) Working Group are proud to announce the public release of the nested-Experimental AI Global and Limited-area Ensemble (nested-EAGLE) Application v1.1.0. This release is an update to the v1.0.0 release from April 22, 2026, which was designed for training and evaluating a global-nested configuration of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and partner agencies’ Anemoi machine learning (ML) forecast system. It expands the retrospective forecast system into a global-nested near real-time (NRT) forecast system capable of being fully trained or run from a pretrained checkpoint file. It also incorporates several other updates.
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Capability Announcement: UFS-DA Diagnostics Toolkit v1.0
The Community Global Workflow v1.0.0 Release
NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), National Weather Service (NWS)’s Office of Modeling and Development (OMD), and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Community Global Workflow (GW) v1.0.0 (https://github.com/NOAA-EMC/global-workflow). This is the first time EPIC is releasing the Community GW framework, which provides an end‑to‑end workflow designed to run global configurations of medium range numerical weather forecasting for the UFS-Weather Model (WM). It is built to support both research and operational implementations. The Community GW v1.0.0 release can be used on NOAA HPC systems, National Science Foundation (NSF) / National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Derecho, and native Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, enabling broad accessibility for the UFS community.
Seasonal Forecast System (SFS) Beta Near-Real-Time Capability Launched
The Seasonal Forecast System (SFS) Beta, version 1.0 Prototype (SFSbeta) was officially launched in Near-Real-Time (NRT) in March 2026. Jointly supported by the National Weather Service (NWS) Modeling Program and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Weather Program Office (WPO), this milestone, under the SFS Project, is a critical step in advancing NOAA’s seasonal forecasting mission. It marks the transition from the 15-year-old Climate Forecast System, version 2.0 (CFSv2) to a modern, fully coupled system based on the Unified Forecast System (UFS).
Scaling an Aerosol Data Product Pre-Processing Pipeline
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global System Laboratory (NOAA-GSL), in collaboration with the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and NOAA’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), has developed a data pre-processing system to support prototyping future versions of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) aerosols component. Future RRFS versions will utilize the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) dynamical core, which, among other features, uses an underlying unstructured, hexagonal grid, in contrast to the Finite Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) dynamical core implemented in RRFSv1, which uses a regular, structured grid for regional modeling. This fundamental change in grid structure required a new approach to pre-processing, particularly the regridding step in a data ingestion pipeline. Furthermore, atmospheric composition modeling requires numerous data products, which can lead to significant performance degradation if I/O is unoptimized. The result is a significant step toward a unified approach to high-resolution aerosol modeling across North America, a key part of modeling the Earth system, and contributes to NOAA’s ambitious goal of a fully-coupled, convection allowing, 3-km global model using MPAS.
NOAA’s NESDIS Advances Global Soil Moisture Monitoring with SMOPS and UFS Land-DA
A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NOAA-NESDIS) and Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) led effort delivers near-real-time, and high-resolution soil moisture products to support Earth System modeling applications worldwide.
UFS Land DA v3.0.0 Release
The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), in close collaboration with the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community, has released version 3 of the UFS Land Data Assimilation (DA) System. This latest release represents a major advancement over the v2.0.0 released in October 2024, by delivering expanded modeling capabilities, broader platform support, and substantial improvements in workflow automation and usability. These enhancements are the result of months of focused development within the land‑DA_workflow and effectively address the evolving needs of the land modeling and DA research community. Land DA v3.0.0 introduces a more flexible and integrated workflow and expands its land-atmosphere modeling capabilities by integrating the ATMosphere-Land (ATML) coupling configuration of the UFS Weather Model. This enables interactive execution of the FV3 UFSATM atmospheric model with the Noah‑MP Land Surface Model (LSM). The v3.0.0 workflow also adds enhanced data‑forcing capabilities through the integration of ECMWF Reanalysis 5th-generation data (ERA5) via the Data ATmosphere Model (DATM) forcing component, along with updates to the ATML physics suite, including FV3_GFS_v17_p8_ugwpv1.
NOAA Chooses MPAS to be the Next-Generation NWS Operational Model
At the annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) meeting on January 26, 2026, the National Weather Service (NWS) Director, Ken Graham, announced an ambitious 10-year goal for NOAA to adopt a global, fully coupled, and convection allowing 3-km unified system using the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) for both research and operations.
Enabling Community Innovation Through an Innovative Approach to Sharing Modeling Containers
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth Prediction Innovation Center (NOAA-EPIC) implemented an innovative container architecture that preserves high-performance computing workflows while strengthening long-term distribution sustainability. Developed through collaboration with NOAA EPIC, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) container experts, and academic partners, the solution enables continued delivery of Unified Forecast System (UFS) applications through streamlining processes. This work now supports a community of more than 60,000 users across NOAA, academia, and industry by providing reliable, scalable access to numerical weather and Earth system modeling applications.
