2.7 Unifying the Production Suite at the NWS: What does this mean for Convection Allowing Models?

Tolman, Hendrick L., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service/Office of Science and Technology Integration

The National Weather Service (NWS) runs a large set of environmental models on a fixed schedule to support the mission of the NWS and of NOAA as a whole. This so-called Production Suite focuses on weather model applications, but also includes other environmental applications particularly for oceans, waves, aerosols, land and sea ice. Over many years, this production suite has evolved in a disjointed quilt of overlapping applications, which becomes increasingly difficult to maintain and improve. This issue has been identified for many years in external review. Starting with the NWS response to the UCACN Model Advisory Committee (UMAC) he NWS has started to work on a unified and simplified production suite.
Initial efforts of the NWS to simplify the production suite have focused on the foundational global weather models in the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS), and significant progress has been made there, particularly with adopting a new global dynamic core allowing suitable for non-hydrostatic, convection allowing applications on exascale computing resources, and by starting to move to a Common Community Physics Package (CCPP). The next major task is to address unification of Convection Allowing Model (CAM) applications.
The presentation will focus on the high-level Strategic Vision and Roadmap plans for unifying the Production Suite at the NWS. Particular focus will be given to evolving plans to unify CAM application, as this is particularly of interest for the WRF community.