As part of the Weather Act and its reauthorization, Congressionally-mandated reports and activities are required to be submitted to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce and/or to the U.S. Congress. Once approved, post-decisional reports are collected and housed in the NOAA Institutional Repository for public use and availability.
Offices within NOAA with reporting requirements:
All Weather Act Publications can be accessed via the NOAA Institutional Repository.
Maintaining and growing High Performance Computing (HPC) capability is one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) highest priorities. Advancements in operational forecasts, predictions, and projections cannot occur without sustained investment in NOAA’s HPC resources. NOAA’s HPC resources are critical to operational forecasts, predictions, projections, and applications, and to the research and development (R&D) modeling efforts to improve those operational products. Meeting NOAA’s mission requires a sustained growth and balance of operational HPC and R&D HPC. Both systems are required to maintain an effective and evolving program that is capable of delivering model-based products important to the Nation today and into the future.
The study examined the impact of radar coverage on warnings for tornadoes and flash floods, although it should be noted that radar also provides necessary observations to support other weather warnings (e.g., hail/severe thunderstorms, winter weather, hurricanes, etc.,) that are not addressed by the study and this report. Tornadoes and flash floods are rare events in general, and only a small fraction of those events cause fatalities.
USWRP began in the 1990s, with a principal motivation to accelerate the rate of forecast improvements by taking advantage of science results and technology advancements, which satisfy an increased need for improved weather information in weather sensitive economic sectors.
The COSMIC-1 mission was launched in 2006 as a proof-of-concept for a new, inexpensive radio occultation (RO) atmospheric sounding technique as a partnership between Taiwan and the United States, and led by the National Science Foundation with participation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), U.S. Air Force, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since early 2007, high fidelity RO atmospheric profile data from COSMIC-1 have led to important, measurable improvements in weather forecasts, and space weather monitoring and research. NOAA determined that continued access to RO measurements aligned with its mission to improve weather forecasts.
This annual report is in response to the Title I, Section 102, (codified at 15 U.S.C. §8512) of the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017, 15 U.S.C. § 8501 (hereafter referred to as the Weather Act), which was passed into law by Congress on April 18, 2017.
This report outlines the current use of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) S2S products and services, and how NOAA plans to improve the usability and transference of data, information, and forecasts. It will serve as a guidepost for NOAA planning and execution, as well as to inform the public and NOAA’s stakeholders on its efforts on subseasonal and seasonal forecasting. It was developed with input from Federal, regional, state, tribal, and local government agencies, research institutions, and the private sector. The report starts by identifying current S2S products and services, and then outlines innovations needed to enable and improve them. Two main goals for improving products and services are: (i) improving the skill of foundational tools in order to improve the skill of the official S2S forecasts, and (ii) enhancing the value of S2S products for stakeholders.
