The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. NOAA’s operational model suite for numerical weather prediction (NWP) is quickly transitioning to the UFS from a number of different modeling systems. The UFS enables research, development, and contribution opportunities within the broader Weather Enterprise (including government, industry, and academia). For more information about the UFS, visit the UFS Portal.
The UFS includes multiple applications that support different forecast timescales and spatial domains. This page primarily describes the Global Workflow (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 a combination of several model components seamlessly integrated into an end-to-end workflow to pre-process, analyze, generate, post-process, and verify forecast data. GW eliminates the need for manual stitching of these model components and ensures consistency between operational forecasts and research experiments.
The Community GW v1.0.0 supports Global Forecast System (GFS), Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), Global Chemistry and Aerosol Forecast System (GCAFS), and Seasonal Forecast System (SFS) model configurations. This version also includes Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI; atmosphere-only) and Joint Effort for Data Assimilation (DA) Integration (JEDI) systems. The Community GW v1.0.0 release builds on the joint operational/development workflow developed at NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) Office of Model Development (OMD) and extends it for community use through the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), enabling new users, researchers, developers, and partners to build and run from among many available configurations.
The GW components include the UFS-WM for forecast generation, GSI/GSI‑Utils/GSI-monitor for atmospheric DA, GDAS (Global DA System) App for transition to the JEDI framework for coupled DA, NOAA Emission and eXchange Unified System (NEXUS) for emissions, GFS‑Utils and UFS‑Utils to run the weather model, and wxflow for workflow management. Forecast verification is performed using OMD’s global verification package, which leverages MET/METplus to compute atmospheric metrics for model runs (as of release, limited to Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) within GW).
GW is built to support both research and operational implementations. The development branch of the GW is continually evolving as the system undergoes open development. The initial release of Community GW (v1.0.0) represents a snapshot of this continuously evolving system.
For any publications resulting from work conducted with Community GW, please include the following DOI citation:
The UFS Global Workflow Development Team. (2026, June. 18th). The Community Global Workflow (GW) Release (Version v1.0.0). Zenodo.
Before running the GW framework, users should determine which of the four levels of support is applicable to their system. Generally, Level 1 & 2 systems are restricted to those with access through National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its affiliates. These include named High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems (e.g., Hercules, Orion, Derecho). Level 3 & 4 systems include certain personal computers or non-NOAA-affiliated HPC systems.
Accompanying this release are instructions (AWS Cluster build Instructions) and scripts for users to set up their own Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance for running GW. These should allow anyone with an AWS account and sufficient funds to run GW, even if they are unable to get access to the supported HPC platforms. The AMI includes all required software pre-installed and automatically mounts the necessary S3 buckets, enabling broad accessibility for the UFS community.
The Quick Start Chapter provided in the GW Documentation is an excellent place for new users to begin. It provides details on how to clone the GW Community repo, build it, and run a forecast. It walks users through different GW experiment cases and analyzes these test cases results.
The GW User’s Guide has the most comprehensive information on the GW framework, including links to more thorough technical documentation for its components. Users may need different versions of the User’s Guide depending on their goals:
Documentation for the develop branch. This may have gaps and errors.
Community Release v1.0.0. (Identical to the current develop branch)
Documentation for the most recent community release (v1.0.0).
Users can also get expert help through the GitHub Discussions Q&A.
This is the initial release of the Community Global Workflow v1.0.0. See the Releases page for more information on current and past releases.
Release Date: 06/18/2026
Release Description: NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), National Weather Service’s Office of Model Development (OMD), and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the initial public release of the Community Global Workflow v1.0.0 (https://github.com/NOAA-EMC/global-workflow/releases/tag/Community_v1.0.0). It is built to support both research and operational implementations.
A Community GW v1.0.0 User’s Guide, Quick Start guide, and Contributors Guide are available here to provide further information about this release, including instructions for running and testing the framework. Data files required to run the GW framework are available to the public through OMD’s global data bucket and EPIC’s GW v1.0.0 Data Bucket. Interested users can get additional support through the NOAA-EMC GitHub Discussions Forum by
Documentation:
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