105th AMS Annual Meeting
January 12-16, 2025
EPIC is gearing up for its participation in the 105th AMS Annual Meeting will take place from January 12-16, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and Online. The Annual Meeting provides an opportunity for researchers, governments, and private industry to share knowledge and address challenges of integrating research and societal decision-making through collaboration. The training and development of the enterprise’s next-generation workforce will be a crosscutting theme across sectors. The theme for this year’s annual meeting is “Towards a Thriving Planet: Charting the Course Across Scales.”
Fourth Symposium on Community Modeling and Innovation Agenda
The Fourth Symposium on Community Modeling and Innovation is an opportunity to share information about innovations and recent developments that advance community Earth system model capabilities. Topics reflect upon the motivation and processes by which the community can work together to explore, validate, and integrate advances in weather and climate prediction frameworks. Presenters from public, private, and academic sectors are encouraged to discuss how community modeling initiatives can contribute to improving weather and climate forecasting products and services.
| Date | SESSION |
|---|---|
| Tuesday, January 7, 2025 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Virtual Poster Session Virtual Poster Slam |
| Saturday, January 11, 2025 | 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM: Twisters Screening (Hosted by the Student Conference) |
| Sunday, January 12, 2025 | 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM: Presidential Forum 5:30 PM – 6:15 PM: Annual Meeting Welcome and Annual Review |
| Monday, January 13, 2025 | 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Session 1 - Innovative Community Infrastructure for Earth System Models 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM: Session 2 - Improving Representation of Processes in Earth System Models 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM: Joint Session J3 - Advancing Data Assimilation 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Session 4 - Earth System Model Governance and Community Building |
| Tuesday, January 14, 2025 | 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Joint Session J5 - Multi-University Consortium for Advanced Data Assimilation Research and Education (CADRE) I Session 5 - Community Earth System Model Development 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM: Joint Session J7 - Multi-University Consortium for Advanced Data Assimilation Research and Education (CADRE) II Session 7 - Earth Systems Innovation for Community Modeling 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Session 8 - The Unified Forecast System (UFS) and EPIC |
| Wednesday, January 15, 2025 | 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM: Women in Atmospheric Sciences Luncheon 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM: Awards Reception and Ceremony |
| Thursday, January 16, 2025 | 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Joint Session J13A - EPIC Special Session Joint Session J13 - High Performance Computing and Innovative Approaches |
Discover the full agenda for the Fourth Symposium on Community Modeling and Innovation, taking place January 7–16, 2025.
Abstracts
by Jennifer Vogt
presentation date: Monday, 13 January 2025
The Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop is an annual event that brings together the public, private, government and academic sectors from within the Weather Enterprise around the shared goal of advancing the Unified Forecast System (UFS). This workshop serves as a key event for fostering enhanced communication and collaboration between sectors and highlights the importance of community building. It offers a unique venue where participants can explore how the Weather Enterprise can unite effectively, thereby boosting forecasting capabilities, spurring innovation, and achieving success more efficiently.
by Mark Potts
presentation date: Monday, 13 January 2025
NOAA EPIC is simplifying the process of building and running UFS Applications. Through the use of containers built with the full software stack required by UFS Applications, it is now a simple task to build and run NOAA software on almost any Linux-based host system. The methodology of building and running NOAA’s global workflow on a generic system is presented here.
by Wei Huang
presentation date: Monday, 13 January 2025
EPIC is collaborating with the Weather Enterprise, both within and outside NOAA, to make Global-Workflow (GW) accessible on AWS. Initial training covers cluster creation on NOAA ParallelWorks, cloning GW on AWS, and compiling and running GW on the platform. Efforts also focus on optimizing GW for efficient use across standard and higher resolutions (e.g., C96, C192, C768) for the UFS model and Data Assimilation, with plans to expand GW capabilities to other cloud platforms like Azure and Google Cloud.
by Cameron Book
presentation date: Monday, 13 January 2025
NOAA EPIC is currently working to implement a developmental testing framework and integrate idealized test cases into the UFS. This presentation will provide an overview of recent developments regarding the addition of test cases and the associated testing framework that has been introduced into the UFS Weather Model.
by Aaron Jones
presentation date: Monday, 13 January 2025
The EPIC Community Engagement (ECE) team supports the EPIC program’s innovation through several initiatives, including community training events and the annual Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop (UIFCW). The ECE team also coordinates with the EPIC User Support team to update UFS application documentation, compiling technical FAQs, monitoring of support requests, while separately conducting outreach strategies all in an effort to meet the community’s needs.
by Gillian Petro
presentation date: Monday, 13 January 2025
The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) helps advance the Unified Forecast System (UFS) by providing tools and knowledge to the community. This, in turn, establishes a solid foundation from which the community can contribute innovations back to the UFS. This presentation will highlight user and developer support efforts, particularly those related to documentation, code and data management, educational content, and GitHub Q&A forums.
by Maoyi Huang
presentation date: Tuesday, 14 January 2025
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) established the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) to be the catalyst for community research and modeling focused on informing and accelerating advances in our nation’s operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecast modeling systems via the Unified Forecast System (UFS). 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 NWP applications.
by Saeed Moghimi
presentation date: Tuesday, 14 January 2025
NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) is partnering with the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), National Weather Service (NWS) and coastal ocean modeling community to develop its next generation coastal ocean coupling infrastructure for integration into the NOAA Unified Forecast System portfolio.
by Kris Booker
presentation date: Tuesday, 14 January 2025
The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) program has enabled rapid innovation within the numerical weather model community through its implementation of various tools. This presentation will explore those tools’ impact and capability to enable collaboration between various government, academic, and enterprise partners.
by Keven Blackman
presentation date: Tuesday, 14 January 2025
The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) Program drives advancements in national weather prediction through community collaboration, accessible testing environments, and innovation to enhance the Unified Forecast System (UFS). The EPIC contract strengthens this mission by supporting UFS users, fostering a diverse modeling community, and advancing infrastructure, including CI/CD pipelines and cutting-edge UFS tools.
by D. Alex Burrows
presentation date: Thursday, 16 January 2025
The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) aims to improve forecasts of Atmospheric Rivers on the West Coast of the United States. The presentation will discuss porting the global-workflow to the Gaea-C5 supercomputer within the context of the current state of atmospheric river forecast models.
by Jong Kim
presentation date: Thursday, 16 January 2025
Unified Forecast System (UFS) Noah-MP Land Data Assimilation Release and Community Support
Jong Kim1, Chan-Hoo Jeon1, Zachary Shrader2, Cameron Book1, Edward Snyder2, Gillian Petro1
Affiliations: 1) STC@NOAA-EPIC, 2) RTX@NOAA-EPIC
The Unified Forecast System (UFS) Weather Model (WM) is a collaborative Earth modeling system designed for short- and medium-range forecasts, including NOAA’s Global Forecast System (GFS). It includes the Noah Multi-Physics (Noah-MP) land surface model, which can operate in either one-way or two-way coupled modes with atmospheric models. The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the UFS community have developed stand-alone versions of the Noah-MP Land Data Assimilation (DA) System, integrating it with the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) to assimilate snow depth observations from the GHCN-Daily dataset.
| Monday | 13 Jan | ||||
| 8:45-9:00am | Wei Huang | Running UFS Global-workflow on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 9:00-9:15am | Mark Potts | Using NOAA-Epic Containers to Build and Run UFS Applications on Any System | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 11:00-1:15am | Cameron Book | Status of Test Case Integration into UFS Weather Model and Applications | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 3:00-4:30pm | Aaron Jones | Empowering Forecasting Innovation Through EPIC Community Engagement and User Support | Hall C (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 4:45-5:00pm | Gilian Petro | EPIC/UFS Community Support for Earth System Modeling | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 5:15-5:30pm | Jennifer Vogt | Expanding the UFS Community through the Unifying Innovations in Forecasting Capabilities Workshop (UIFCW) | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| Tuesday | 14 Jan | ||||
| 2:30-2:45pm | Kris Booker | EPIC Systems Architecture: Enabling Rapid Innovation | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 4:30-4:45pm | Maoyi Huang | The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) as a Catalyst for NOAA’s Future Earth Prediction System | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 5:00-5:15pm | Keven Blackman | The Earth Prediction Innovation Center – an Overview of the EPIC Contract | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 5:15-5:30pm | Saeed Moghimi | UFS Coastal Model and Planned Applications: Updates and Path Forward | 238 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| Wednesday | 15 Jan | ||||
| 1:40 PM | Keven and Chris | NOAA Booth presentation | NOAA Booth | ||
| Thursday | 16 Jan | ||||
| 8:30-8:45am | Jong Kim | Unified Forecast System (UFS) Noah-MP Land Data Assimilation Release and Community Support | 219 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) | ||
| 8:45-9:00am | Alex Burrows | Porting of the Global-Workflow to Gaea-C5 | 219 (New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center) |
EPIC Presenters
Keven Blackman
EPIC Office of the Chief Engineer Solution Architect
Keven graduated from the University of Illinois, Springfield with a Masters of Science in Computer Science. For over 21 years, Keven has been working in the computer science and meteorology space. He has led weather programs ranging from Air Force Support applications, numerical weather modeling, cloud architect of meteorology applications, to migrating the Air Forces data to the cloud. Currently, he is working as the Chief Engineer of the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and is honored to be charged with driving community contributions to the United Forecast Model (UFS) weather model. He is also currently finishing up a Ph.D. in Information Technology with a focus on blockchain and machine learning and will retire next year after 20 years in Air Force Weather, both Active Duty and National Guard.
Cameron Book
EPIC Software Integration Product Owner
Cameron currently leads the Software Integration Team at NOAA EPIC. Prior to joining the EPIC program, he worked on regional ocean data assimilation (MOM6-SOCA) as a support scientist at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). Outside of NOAA, he worked for several years on coupled earth systems modeling in both academia and government laboratories. He received a Master of Science in Engineering with a focus on solid and fluid mechanics from Brown University and holds a bachelor’s in physics from Emory University.
Kris Booker
EPIC Platform Product Owner
Kris leads the NOAA EPIC Platform Team. He worked for NOAA previously (NEXRAD Operational Support Facility) as an undergraduate student. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma with a minor in Management of Information Systems. Prior to joining Tomorrow.io as a DevOps Engineer, he was a Senior Systems Engineer at Perforce Software and has worked for various private weather companies (Vaisala, Universal Weather & Aviation) during his 20-year career. Kris is an avid aviation enthusiast and aspiring private pilot.
D. Alex Burrows
EPIC Global Workflow and Atmospheric River (GWAR) Product Owner
Alex graduated from Cornell University with a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences, conducting sensitivity studies on the upper-level jetstream’s response to idealized climate change-like thermal forcing. He continued post-graduate research at the University at Albany on jet stream structure and variability focusing on low-level jet streams. Alex most recently worked with NCEP Central Operations as a Scientific Programming Analyst supporting development and production staff on WCOSSI and II. Currently, Alex is the product owner for the NOAA EPIC Global Workflow and Atmospheric River team.
Maoyi Huang
EPIC Program Manager | Weather Program Office
Maoyi Huang, Ph.D., joined the NOAA Weather Program Office (WPO) in August 2021 as the EPIC Program Manager. Prior to WPO, she was the COASTAL Act Program Manager and the lead of land, water, coastal, and cross-cutting infrastructure program areas with the National Weather Service Office of Science and Technology Integration’s Modeling Programs Division. Her scientific expertise lies in understanding the complex multiscale interactions of terrestrial hydrological and ecological processes using an Earth system modeling approach through model development, applications, analysis, and model-data integration. She has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Wei Huang
EPIC Global Workflow and Atmospheric River (GWAR) Team Lead
Wei Huang is a scientific computational engineer at I2X Technologies, in partner with Raytheon’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center. He is currently working on implementing NOAA-EMC’s global-workflow to cloud service platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platforms. Before joining I2X, he worked as computational engineer at NOAA/PSL. Wei has experience in HPC, weather and climate data analysis and visualization.
Aaron Jones
EPIC Release Train Engineer & Community Engagement Scrum Master
Aaron is a retired Air Force veteran with over 20 years of experience in weather operations, forecasting, and analysis. During his career, he gained valuable experience through multiple deployments managing high-tempo weather operations, as well as in many diverse areas such as cybersecurity infrastructure development, network administration, and system implementation. His background provided him the experience needed to employ various project management methodologies, guide complex reorganization processes, and manage large teams. He aims to identify organizational needs and ensure that projects are delivered on time.
Apart from his military experience, Aaron received his associate’s degree in meteorology from the Air Force and a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from the American Military University and received his Master of Science in Cybersecurity in 2023. Having grown up in Spain, Aaron is bilingual and has traveled the world. He is determined to seek out challenging opportunities, fresh perspectives, and innovative thinking.
Jong Kim
EPIC Code Management Product Owner
Jong Kim works as a lead configuration and code manager for the NOAA EPIC program to support the UFS Weather Model and application releases. Before joining EPIC, he led the Marine Data Assimilation Team at NOAA Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). Through the UFS-R2O marine reanalysis project, the Next Generation Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (NG-GODAS) was successfully demonstrated in the JEDI-based Sea-Ice Ocean and Coupled Assimilation (SOCA) framework. Jong also spent about 12 years as a lead software engineer for the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA. His early career included a computational scientist position at the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of the DOE Argonne National Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Utah.
Saeed Moghimi
Physical Scientist NOAA / NOS Storm Surge Modeling Team Lead
After completion of his Ph.D. in 2005, Dr. Saeed Moghimi spent four years in an assistant professor position in the Department of Civil Engineering of Arak University. In 2009, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship in Physical Oceanography at the Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Germany. His scientific research on model coupling, water column turbulence and mixing, wave modeling, coastal ocean circulation modeling, wave-current interaction and the use of data assimilation methods for predicting coastal ocean geophysical variables made him one of the few people with this caliber and expertise for tackling coastal modeling related problems.
Gillian Petro
EPIC User Support Team Lead
Gillian leads the User Support Team at NOAA EPIC and has worked on documentation for the Short-Range Weather Application, the UFS Weather Model, the Land Data Assimilation System, and the Unified Post Processor. Gillian brings a diverse range of experience to EPIC thanks to her previous work for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Baltimore City Public Schools, and the American University Law Review. Gillian received a Master of Science in Data Analytics from University of Maryland Global Campus and a law degree from American University Washington College of Law.
Mark Potts
EPIC Office of the Chief Engineer Solution Architect
Mark graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a Ph.D. from the Program for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Mark worked for several organizations, including the Department of Defense, NASA, and private industry before coming to NOAA in 2015 as a Senior Computational Scientist for the Environmental Modeling Center. He has 25 years of experience in scientific research and HPC software development. Currently, Mark leads the Advanced User Support team for the EPIC program and represents EPIC on the UFS Release Coordination Cross-Cutting Team.
Jennifer Vogt
Physical Scientist NOAA/Weather Program Office | UFS Communications and Outreach Co-Chair
Jennifer Vogt is a contractor currently supporting the NOAA/OAR/WPO EPIC program as the EPIC Project Coordinator. Prior to joining WPO, Jennifer worked as a National Weather Service (NWS) Meteorologist for just over 7 years at Weather Forecast Offices located in Albany, NY and Jackson, KY. During this time, she gained valuable experience with severe storms, winter weather, and hydrology. Outside of forecasting, Jennifer thrived working and building relationships with NWS’s core partners through Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS) as well as within her leadership roles as a Regional Coordinator for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), Weather-Ready Nation Team Co-Lead, and local office Webmaster. Jennifer is an expert in satellite imagery analysis through her experience working with the Satellite Analysis Branch of the National Environmental and Satellite Data Information Service.
AMS presentations from EPIC partners at Tomorrow.io
MON
1/13
9:00AM
Title: J1A.3 – The Tomorrow.io Mircowave Sounder Constellation: Pre-launch Performance Assessment and Early On-Orbit Results
Authors: S. Joseph J. Munchak (Presenter), Ethan Nelson
2:00PM
Title: 4A.4 – Accelerating the Transition of satelite Precipitation Retrievals
MLOps Best Practices
Authors: Brandon Mason Taylor (Presenter), Forest Cannon, Simon Pfreundschuh, S. Joseph J. Munchak, Stylianos Flampouris
TUES
1/14
2:30PM
Title: 7.4 EPIC Systems Architecture: Enabling Rapid Innovation
Authors: Kristopher Booker (Presenter), Anna Kimball
3:00PM
Title: 488 – Progress toward global operational utilization of the Tomorrow Microwave Sounder with the Joint Effort for the Data Assimilation
Authors: Jonathon Guerrette (Presenter), Ryan Honeyager, Stephen J. Munchak, Stylianos Flampouris
WED
1/15
2:45PM
Title: 11A.5 – Probalistic Calibration for ML-Based Extreme Event Prediction
Authors: Mariah Pope, Maxfield Green (Presenter), Ashley Elizabeth Payne, Arun Chawla, Stelios Flampouris
