Project Charter

Unified Workflow Team

Product Owner: Christina Holt christina.holt@noaa.gov
Scrum Master: Fredrick Gabelmann fredrick.gabelmann@noaa.gov

Stakeholders

• NOAA Operational System Developers
• UFS Community

Funding Sources

Special thanks to our funding programs and agencies for making this effort possible.

• NOAA Weather Program Office (WPO) Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI)
• NOAA WPO EPIC Program
• NOAA Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) Software Engineering for Novel Architectures (SENA)
• NOAA Global Systems Lab
• NCEP Environmental Modeling Center
• NOAA WPO Research to Operations (R2O) Project

Overview

The Unified Workflow (UW) Team is building an open-source modern Python package named uwtools that helps automate common tasks needed for many standard numerical weather prediction (NWP) workflows and provides drivers to automate the configuration and execution of Unified Forecast System (UFS) components, providing flexibility, interoperability, and usability to various UFS Applications.

We will have succeeded in this goal once all UFS Applications regularly use the uwtools package for performing common tasks in the respective configuration subsystems, as well as using the package to drive the components at run-time.

Scope

The uwtools package will develop a set of tools that can be used as a third-party library in any UFS Application. The package contains object-oriented components that meet even more stringent requirements that classify them as services, ensuring that the Unified Workflow framework acts as a service-oriented architecture for NWP systems.

The UW Team Goal is to replace existing configuration layers with a Unified Framework that interfaces to existing supported Workflow Managers and to create a set of UFS component drivers that are interoperable, interchangeable, and highly configurable to meet the needs of all UFS applications.

The UW Team will work with stakeholders to ensure that their requirements are met, the most notably strict being NCEP operational requirements.

Schedule

Highest Priorities

• Develop and release Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) Drivers
• Incorporate released tools in the Short Range Weather (SRW) Application
• Incorporate released tools in additional UFS Apps

Milestones

• Develop generic tools necessary for completing common SRW App tasks. (Ongoing)
• Add automatic installation of conda environments during the SRW App build process. (Complete)
• Create a blueprint of the UW Framework using UML or other visualization tools. (Jan 2024)
• Replace SRW App run scripts with UW drivers, including forecast, data ingest, data pre-processing, and postprocessing. (May 2024)
• Replace the SRW App configuration layer with the UW framework. (May 2024)
• Introduce JEDI drivers to the SRW App supporting deterministic DA approaches. (Starting Jan 2024)
• Introduce JEDI drivers to the SRW App supporting ensemble DA approaches. (Starting May 2024)
• Collaborate with the Atmospheric Rivers Forecast System (ARFS) developers to integrate uwtools for a global application that supports nests and global data assimilation with JEDI. (July 2024)