It’s almost time for the JCSDA Symposium at the annual AMS Meeting next month on January 14, 2020.

After hearing NOAA’s 2020 proposed budget earlier this year, it was made clear that the United States is behind when it comes to weather forecasting. Among other things, efficient weather forecasting is crucial for protecting lives and predicting natural disasters such as hurricanes. Climate change continues to increase occurrences of disruptive weather events, making the need for superior forecasting critical. Why is the United States seemingly so behind?

JCSDA leadership collaborated with CPAESS/UCP/UCAR to host DC-area JCSDA staff at the Quarterly Staff Meeting at the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, DC on Wednesday, October 30, 2019.

In an effort to grow the JCSDA within the university community, Program Specialist Kat Shanahan attended the University of Colorado, Boulder STEM career fair to promote internship and job opportunities within JCSDA.

From August 19 to August 30, JEDI affiliates and core team members were busy working on a UFO code sprint here at the UCAR campus in Boulder, CO. During the sprint, team members worked to improve existing observation operators, added some new observation operators to UFO, added new capabilities to generic filters used in JEDI code quality control, and implemented new filters in UFO.

The JEDI Academy is a tutorial held to act as a training session for those working on the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) utilized by JCSDA and affiliated partners focused on producing more accurate forecasting predictions. The 3rd JEDI Academy was held this past week in Boulder, Colorado from June 10–13, 2019.

The 17th Annual JCSDA Technical Review Meeting and Science Workshop was held from May 29 - 31, 2019 in Washington, D.C. at NASA Headquarters. The 17th JCSDA Technical Review Meeting and Science Workshop is designed to be a showcase of what JCSDA employees and affiliates have worked on scientifically throughout the year. Participants present posters or give oral presentations on project findings.

Each year NCAR, UCAR, and UCP staff are invited to attend this full day event to network and share recent scientific developments. This year, JCSDA director Tom Auligné gave a talk entitled, “A Fresh Look at O2R/R2O Transition.”

From March 25, 2019 to April 5, 2019 members of the JCSDA SOCA team and affiliated partners are working on developing interfaces to databases (IODA), refining existing UFOs, and implementing new UFOs.

The Interface for Observation Data Access (IODA) is a component of the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) software system. From a user’s perspective, IODA handles the input of observation data and output of diagnostic data. Efforts to transform IODA from a prototype system into an operational system that can handle big data is under way, and the task of collecting requirements from the JCSDA partner organizations was initiated by the 2019 IODA Workshop.