NOAA has unified around two world-leading modeling systems to carry out its minutes-to-millennia mission: the Unified Forecast System for weather applications and NWS operations, and the GFDL Seamless Modeling Suite for climate-focused prediction, projection, and understanding. These share several major community components, including the FV3 Dynamical Core and the MOM6 Ocean Model. The NOAA Research Global-Nest Initiative is a multi-institution partnership to develop multiscale “digital twins” of the earth system for medium-range and subseasonal prediction and for ultra-high resolution climate modeling. This initiative will take advantage of new capabilities in our foundational technologies (FV3, SHiELD, FMS, Pace, etc.) to create global-nested convective-scale models, global storm-resolving models, and experimental kilometer and sub-kilometer scale process models. Results on cloud-radiation-prediction interactions, hurricanes, severe weather, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, and more will be shown. Progress on public availability, technology transfer, simulation on GPUs, and on large-eddy scale modeling will also be described, as will how this effort is acting to improve and extend both the UFS and SMS.
Lucas Harris has been interested in the weather since he was five years old. He is the Deputy Division Leader of the Weather and Climate Dynamics Division at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. His research is focused on development and application of the GFDL Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core (FV3) to create new models for frontier weather and climate problems. He holds a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences and an MS in Applied Mathematics, both from the University of Washington, and previously worked at Princeton University and NCAR.
