NOAA’s budget request seeks $6.6 billion in discretionary appropriations, an increase of $224.8 million from the enacted level for fiscal year 2024. But under that request, certain programs would still see decreases, which lawmakers on the Environment Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee called into question Tuesday.

In opening remarks, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., who chairs the full committee, said he was “extremely disappointed” that NOAA’s proposed budget decreases funding for its Oceanic and Atmospheric Research division and weather and air chemistry research programs. Those programs were given additional responsibilities and increased authorizations under the bipartisan Weather Act Reauthorization passed in April.

“Yes the budget request is simply a request, and at the end of the day Congress controls the purse strings,” Lucas said. “But the budget request is also a message to all stakeholders and industry, and NOAA’s message is this: the need for improved early and accurate forecasting of severe weather is not a priority for this administration.”

Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., the subcommittee’s ranking member, expressed similar concerns in her opening remarks about cuts to programs within the OAR and the National Ocean Service. 

“These funding reductions would negatively impact NOAA’s capacity to execute coastal observations, ecosystem protection, ocean exploration, innovative research, educational outreach and many more important functions that advance the agency’s mission,” Ross said. “I hope we can discuss strategies to continue the essential work of these programs even under the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.”

The Fiscal Responsibility Act is a compromise deal that temporarily suspended the debt limit and set caps on defense and nondefense discretionary spending through fiscal years 2024 and 2025. That deal has an additional constraint to the budget process, causing agencies to make difficult choices about their investments.

The hearing also comes as science agencies and programs across the government experienced reductions in the fiscal year 2024 appropriations, including OAR. While the budget for 2025 would be an overall increase in discretionary spending for the agency, it would also decrease the agency’s National Ocean Service budget by 14% and the OAR budget by 11%, according to numbers provided by the subcommittee.

NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in his opening remarks that the budget request seeks funding for five areas: investing in the next generation of environmental satellites; addressing climate change through training professionals and expanding technology; providing science and data that informs economic development; improving knowledge-sharing and service delivery in tribal, urban, and rural communities; and reducing the agency’s maintenance backlog. 

Spinrad said NOAA is prioritizing funding for its satellite constellation. That includes development of its Geostationary Extended Observations satellite program, which the agency says aims to expand weather, climate and ocean observations. 

Notably, the National Weather Service also plans to begin transitioning the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System to a cloud framework. Spinrad said that work “will give forecasters secure remote access to provide in-person, impact-based decision support services to decision-makers anytime, anywhere.”

Another program that received attention for proposed cuts was the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System Program, known as IOOS, which uses data and technologies to provide information and forecasts for the ocean, coasts and Great Lakes.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., asked Spinrad how the fiscal year 2025 budget request proposes a $32.5 million cut, or 76% reduction, to that program’s funding, adding that she’s “concerned about some kind of budgetary cliff” when funds from the Inflation Reduction Act expire. That bill provided $3.3 billion to NOAA.

Spinrad said IOOS is one of several programs that reflects “the very difficult decisions that we had to make in this budget,” in part because of the constraints under the Fiscal Responsibility Act and the agency’s commitment to sustaining its current work, such as its investment in satellites and ensuring mission-essential functions don’t falter. 

While the IRA is providing some funding for the program, Spinrad said, it’s not one-for-one. He said he’s meeting with IOOS regional directors to understand what the reductions mean. “We’ve directed that data management [and] cyber infrastructure be the specific activity that is sustained,” he said.

Ross also told Spinrad she was concerned about staffing cuts at the National Weather Service, especially as the hurricane season “is predicted to be extremely active.” 

The fiscal year 2024 budget cut roughly 100 positions from the NWS, Ross said, adding that if the fiscal year 2025 budget doesn’t increase staffing to inflation levels, it “could increase the burden on an already strained workforce.” She asked Spinrad how an “austere” staffing budget would impact the service.

“Our ability to bring people on board is not where I want it to be,” Spinrad said, adding that the agency hired 1,700 people last year, but still needs to focus on retention. NWS Director Ken Graham, Spinrad noted, “is working aggressively to optimize the staffing plan” for weather forecast offices.

The post Tough budget decisions for NOAA in focus at House hearing appeared first on FedScoop.

With this upgrade, NOAA’s twin supercomputers, located in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona, will now operate at a speed of 14.5 petaflops each, and together, the forecast system can process 29 quadrillion calculations per second.

The boost to NOAA’s Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) through increased computing power and storage will help improve U.S. forecast model guidance in the coming years by allowing more data to be fed into and analyzed by the system.

“This increased supercomputing power allows for upgrades to specific modeling systems that will help weather forecasters deliver more accurate weather forecasts, watches and warnings and improved certainty in a forecast,” said Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service.

The faster supercomputer will permit upgrades to NOAA’s weather forecasting systems and models over the next few years such as: upgrades to the U.S. Global Forecast System to make it higher-resolution; a new Rapid Refresh Forecast System which will allow for larger ensembles with more data included; upgrades to the Global Ensemble Forecast System, which will more accurately capture what is known as radiatively active aerosols to better model emissions such as wildfire smoke, dust and fog; and expansions in compute power and storage, which will provide operational capacity to implement research and development advancements made through NOAA’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center.

The post NOAA supercomputer gets a 20% boost to help make better weather predictions appeared first on FedScoop.

NWS‘s Office of Water Prediction needs engineers, technicians, program and project managers, data scientists, and software developers to deliver three improved or innovative capabilities sought by the decade’s end: the National Water Model (NWM), flood inundation mapping (FIM) services and an enterprise hydrofabric solution.

A contract resulting from NOAA’s sources sought notice would cover development of a Next-Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework starting in 2025 with a testing environment for optimizing both the NWM and FIM. The framework would be updated annually.

Details of the new contract were published by the agency earlier this month in a performance work statement on SAM.gov.

The chosen contractor would also be expected to improve FIM services helping NOAA make flood emergency response decisions by improving the depiction of where, when and how infrastructure is impacted.

Lastly the contractor will establish an enterprise hydrofabric solution — a digital representation of significant water features on and below the land’s surface — supporting both the NWM and FIM. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which NWS is a part, is developing an earth system modeling framework to which all three capabilities are key and that will help with decision making.

“Over the last decade, NWS has taken proactive steps to transform and innovate its modeling capacity, as well as move into a partner and customer-centric service delivery model to create a climate-ready nation (CRN) that is prepared for and responds to weather, water and climate-dependent events,” reads NOAA’s performance work statement. “Building a CRN was identified by the secretary of Commerce as one of the top Department of Commerce priorities.”

The winning contractor will work out of its own facilities, and NOAA is interested in improving small business competition through this sources sought. Responses are due by 5 p.m. EDT on Sept. 8, 2022.

The post National Weather Service seeks IT expertise to develop next-gen water prediction capabilities appeared first on FedScoop.

The worst of the geomagnetic storm affecting Earth likely occurred Wednesday night, with only minor conditions since, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center on Friday.

SWPC is keeping agencies like NASA abreast of the storm, which may affect their satellites and communications over the next 24 hours, but expected moderate conditions at worst as of 10:11 a.m. EST.

Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s facility in Boulder, Colorado continue to analyze solar wind data coming in from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and provide agencies and industry with situational awareness.

“It’s almost like the Sun shoots a magnet out into space,” Bill Murtagh, SWPC program coordinator, told FedScoop.

Part of an eruption began impacting the Earth’s magnetic field Wednesday night, producing geomagnetic storm conditions at the G1, minor, and G2, moderate, levels on a scale that goes up to G5, extreme. The storm was expected to peak at the G3, strong, level but no longer.

Geomagnetic storms heat and expand the atmosphere, changing its density in a way that can throw satellites off their orbit, and they can also cause electrostatic discharge on spacecraft. SpaceX lost 40 Starlink satellites it launched in February due to geomagnetic activity that didn’t even reach the G1 level.

“We have good communication,” Murtagh added. “We get these alerts and warnings out not just to industry but anybody and everybody that owns satellites, so NASA for example, with near-Earth and deep-space satellites, would get this information.”

SWPC is a division of the National Weather Service that’s been keeping an eye on a small cluster of sunspots, three times the size of Earth, that’s been unusually active the last four to five days. Daily eruptions have caused coronal mass ejections, releases of a billion tons of plasmic gas and magnetic field.

It issues alerts to about 70,000 Product Subscription Service subscribers, including almost every major satellite company globally, to help them plan for geomagnetic storms.

While satellite companies don’t really share information on how the storms ultimately affect them, agencies like NASA do — though not immediately. Weeks to months of analysis are required to determine if an anomaly on a spacecraft was due to a geomagnetic storm or something else, and SWPC might not catch wind for six months after an event, Murtagh said.

The last time the Earth experienced a G5-level storm, Oct. 29, 2003, NASA eventually released a report revealing that about 50% to 60% of their satellite fleet had been affected to various degrees.

“When they feel the effects, we will typically hear about it afterward,” Murtagh said.

No agencies had reported being affected by the current geomagnetic storm as of Friday, and G2-level storms don’t typically produce “big” effects, he added. But SWPC can still extend its existing watch or announce a new one and issue alerts as the storm level changes.

Geomagnetic storms can also degrade communications because they cause changes in the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere satellite signals must pass through to reach Earth. That said, cell phones will remain unaffected because line-of-sight communications are resilient due to cell towers.

Airlines aren’t as lucky because planes rely on high-frequency communications when traveling over oceans, and those signals bounce off the ionosphere and are degraded by solar flares. The situation isn’t dangerous because airlines have redundancies built in, namely switching to satellite communications or linking to other aircraft, Murtagh said.

A final way geomagnetic storms affect Earth is with geomagnetically induced currents that can flow through good conductive material like salt water and certain soil. The currents can move through rock formations into power grids, and introducing a direct current into an alternating current network is “not a good thing,” Murtagh said.

In the case of a G3-level storm however, the situation is “mostly” manageable without risk of power outages, he added.

The Sun’s magnetic poles reverse every 11 years, leading to a solar cycle much like a hurricane season where sunspots emerge.

Generally there are one to two G5-level storms every solar cycle, although there were none last cycle. No G5 or even G4s have been seen so far this cycle, but the solar maximum, when the most sunspots appear, isn’t until 2024-25.

“We’re ramping up to the next maximum,” Murtagh said. “So we’re going to see an increase of activity.”

The post Geomagnetic storm expected to pass with minimal impact on agencies’ satellites, comms appeared first on FedScoop.

NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) needs a more agile, scalable information system to process data, and its Commercial Services Integrated Product Team identified space-based data relays (SBDRs) as an emerging technology that might fill that need.

The service manages the data gathered by the National Weather Service. Much like NASA, NESDIS plans to transition away from government-owned and -operated satellite services to those managed in partnership with industry, so it needs cost-effective commercial technologies like SBDR that will improve space-ground communications and mission operations.

“NESDIS is formulating plans for transition to a common services-based enterprise ground architecture that is both supportive of NOAA’s next-generation satellite observing systems and responsive to new and evolving threats and opportunities,” reads NOAA’s request for information (RFI).

The service wants SBDR capabilities that are either deployable within five years into in-development satellite platforms or that can facilitate out-of-the-box communications to on-orbit satellites in the S/X/Ka-band. Those capabilities must be able to relay critical telemetry and commanding data, as well as higher-rate science mission-data, to and from NOAA satellites.

NOAA uses geostationary (GEO) orbit satellites for earth-facing persistent observations, low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites for earth-facing global observations and both for space weather observations.

RFI responses are due by 12 p.m. EST on Sept. 8, 2022, and respondents may request virtual one-on-one discussions in September or October.

The post NOAA looks to improve satellite data availability, manage services with industry appeared first on FedScoop.

The website contains information from the National Integrated Health Health Information System (NIHHIS), an interagency partnership developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which also includes extreme heat preparedness and response resources.

Heat.gov is one in a series of actions the Biden administration is taking to address record-breaking temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit due to climate change, sending tens of thousands of Americans to emergency rooms and increasing health problems for seniors, children and workers.

“Heat related illnesses and death are largely preventable with proper planning, education and action,” reads the Heat.gov homepage. “Heat.gov serves as the premier source of heat and health information for the nation to reduce the health, economic and infrastructural impacts of extreme heat.”

The website’s first visual depicts the number of people in the U.S. under a National Weather Service extreme heat advisory, watch or warning during the last 30 days. Below that is the current national heat forecast, CDC Heat & Health Tracker and The Climate Explorer derived from global climate models of coming decades.

Meanwhile the Department of Health and Human Services, through the White House’s new Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, launched a Climate and Health Outlook to inform health professionals of climate events in the next 30 to 60 days and improve response.

The post White House unveils HEAT.gov to help address record-breaking temperatures appeared first on FedScoop.

Dogwood in Manassas, Virginia, and Cactus in Phoenix are configured identically: operating three times faster than their predecessors at 12.1 petaflops and boasting double the storage at 26 petabytes each.

NOAA awarded General Dynamics IT the first, $150 million task order on the $505.2 million Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) contract in February 2020 with the goal of improving models guiding forecasts.

“As forecasts become more accurate, and weather and climate events become more extreme, the public needs more detailed forecast information further in advance,” Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service, said on a press call Tuesday. “And this takes more advanced computing.”

The twin Hewlett Packard Enterprise Cray supercomputers, ranked 49th and 50th fastest in the world by the TOP500 project, will provide NOAA’s NWS with:

• high-resolution models that better capture small-scale features like severe thunderstorms,
• more realistic model physics that better represent the formation of clouds and precipitation,
• a larger number of individual model simulations to better quantify confidence in results, and
• improved use of billions of weather observations to better forecast.

Dogwood and Cactus will further pave the way for fall upgrades to the Global Forecast System (GFS), air quality models, and ocean-going and Great Lakes wave prediction systems.

NOAA is moving from deterministic models to ensemble-based systems that couple atmosphere and oceans, giving forecasters the ability to assess the probability something might happen.

“Being able to provide probabilistic information to the public, through the use of ensemble-based modeling systems, is going to be a very exciting change coming up,” said Brian Gross, director of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center.

NOAA further plans to launch a new hurricane forecast model, the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS), ahead of the 2023 hurricane season — pending tests and evaluations. HAFS replaces two legacy systems, and will predict the track and intensity of tropical cyclones.

NWS will be able to extend hurricane forecasts to seven days, Graham said. 

Dogwood and Cactus’ predecessors were located in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida — a problem if a catastrophic weather event hit the East Coast downing both. That’s why the new supercomputers are hosted on opposite sides of the country.

WCOSS is an eight-year base contract with a two-year renewal. While its predecessor included performance enhancements on the front end — requiring IBM to guarantee price performance 10 years out — NOAA only required GDIT to propose the first task order award for this contract.

“I’m actually really excited about that because it leaves us open to be able to look at what are experiences on the existing system, where we need to make improvements in balance in the computing system, or as different technologies evolve we can take advantage of those and not be strapped to that initial price performance guess,” said Dave Michaud, director of NWS’s Office of Central Processing.

NOAA anticipates the second phase task order, covering the last five years of the contract, will be awarded in the 2024-25 timeframe.

The agency will work with GDIT to identify industry trends and incorporate those, along with any new computing requirements, into the next phase of WCOSS.

“We’ve actually left that wide open,” Michaud said.

The post NOAA unveils 2 weather and climate supercomputers for improved forecasting appeared first on FedScoop.