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.

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The agency’s new Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS) went into operation on June 27 and is set to run alongside existing models for the 2023 season before being deployed as NOAA’s main hurricane forecasting model.

NOAA’s updated model more accurately predicts the rapid intensification of storms and has a range of features including the ability to provide higher resolution observations. In particular, the new model showed a 10% to 15% improvement in predictions of storm track, compared with existing models.

The National Hurricane Center’s forecasting models are crucial for giving U.S. citizens advanced warning about storms and are also widely used by the private sector, including the insurance industry, to model economic damage.

Commenting on the new model, NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said: “The quick deployment of HAFS marks a milestone in NOAA’s commitment to advancing our hurricane forecasting capabilities, and ensuring continued improvement of services to the American public.”

He added: “Development, testing and evaluations were jointly carried out between scientists at NOAA Research and the National Weather Service, marking a seamless transition from development to operations.”

NOAA will continue upgrading the model over the next few years, and to halve the number of model forecast errors detected in 2017 by 2027. HAFS is also the first new major forecast model to use NOAA’s updated weather and climate supercomputers, which were installed last summer.

HAFS was jointly created by NOAA’s National Weather Service Environmental Modeling Center, Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory and NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Marine & Atmospheric Studies.

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In a letter sent June 1 to the comptroller of the United States, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said the GAO should probe whether NOAA followed best practices when drawing up cost estimates and designing its GeoXO program.

The request comes after an earlier 2015 report by the watchdog identified major delays and budget overruns in the development of GeoXO’s preceding $10.9 billion weather satellite program, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R Series (GOES-R). 

GeoXO is a replacement for GOES-R and is intended to provide advanced detection and monitoring of environmental hazards like wildfires, smoke, dust, volcanic ash, drought, and flooding.

In their missive, the lawmakers wrote: “Given the cost, complexity, and scope of the GeoXO program; its similarities to the GOES-R initiative; and uncertainty around the newly implemented acquisition processes at NOAA, our committees have concerns about—and are asking GAO to review—the GeoXO program’s ability to meet its cost, schedule, and performance requirements.”

Rep. Lucas is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, while Sen. Cruz holds the post of ranking member in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

The lawmakers are seeking an evaluation of NOAA’s approach to design and development for the GeoXO program, an assessment of which milestones have been met, and an evaluation of whether the agency has identified and incorporated lessons from the previous GOES-R program.

GeoXO has a projected lifecycle cost of $19.6 billion.

GAO previously identified significant risks to weather forecasting technology arising from NOAA’s failure to ensure operational overlap. Mitigating weather satellite gaps has appeared on the watchdog’s High-Risk List for multiple years.

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ProTech 2.0 is a vehicle designed for the delivery of research, engineering and consulting services across the four domains of satellites, fisheries, weather and oceans.

Phase one proposals for this section of the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract are due on June 15, with a second, more in-depth round of proposals due later this summer after phase one bidders are selected.

The oceans section of Protech 2.0 is the fourth domain to be issued for consideration by prospective offerors. Most recently, NOAA began issuing task orders in the satellite domain and expects to make awards within its weather domain in the first quarter of 2025.

The scope of work in the oceans domain includes studies, analyses, and reports; applied research, development, engineering, consulting and operations; field sampling, data collecting, and surveys; consulting, program and project management; and capacity building. 

Each Protech 2.0 contract has a five-year base ordering period and a single, five-year optional ordering period for a total term of 10 years.

Updates to other multi-billion dollar federal technology vehicles in recent months include the extension of the $5 billion VETS 2 solicitation, which was announced in February by the General Services Administration.

In January, the Department of Veterans Affairs issued a statement of work for the $60.7 billion T4NG2 IT services contract vehicle.

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According to the agency, the upgrade will provide new forecasts for surge, tide and waves for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They will improve model calculations of friction over different types of land surface.

Notably, the updated model can run simultaneously for two storms, which could help NOAA respond more effectively when multiple hurricanes make landfall.

Storm surge is one of the deadliest elements of a hurricane and is caused primarily by the strong winds in a hurricane or tropical storm.

NOAA’s storm surge model is known as the P-surge model and was first released in 2008 by the agency’s Meteorological Development Laboratory. It uses official wind forecasts from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center as well as data from the center about average errors in track, size and intensity of storms.

The approach allows the agency to provide a range of possible outcomes based on the percentage chance of each and where necessary to communicate worst-case scenarios to other agencies and the general public.

Commenting on the launch of the updated model, NOAA National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said: “We are seeing a sharp increase in catastrophic storm surge impacts in our coastal communities.”

He added: “Our new capabilities to effectively and accurately model and forecast storm surge is critical to upholding the NWS mission of protection of life and property.”

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In a statement to FedScoop, spokesperson Cori B. Hughes said: “The Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization [office] coordinated efforts after a solid functional analysis to bring NOAA providers/clinicians onto the single common federal EHR currently used by VA, DOD, and the U.S. Coast Guard.”

She added: “There are 24 projected provider/clinicians that are USPHS officers located at 7 NOAA sites serving 300 officers and 400 divers. For NOAA, our Leidos Partnership for Defense Health will implement MHS GENESIS as a standard package. NOAA’s deployment is targeted for summer 2023.”

The Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization Office is charged with overseeing the rollout of the electronic health records system at the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Coast Guard and other federal agencies. Its director and deputy director report to the deputy secretary of Defense and the deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs.

NOAA is expected to implement the Oracle Cerner Millennium platform as part of the federal electronic health records modernization program (FEDHRM), which is intended to create a single, common health record for employees working at the DOD, VA, Coast Guard and other federal agencies.

In a separate statement to FedScoop, a NOAA spokesperson said: “The system meets the security requirements for NOAA uniformed service members’ health records, and integrates with the medical care system used by all uniformed service officers. No timeline for implementation is available at this stage.”

According to the NOAA spokesperson, the DOD’s instance of the electronic health records platform, MHS Genesis, will be deployed within its Office of Marine and Aviation Operations to manage health records for the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps.

Details of the NOAA system rollout come after the VA earlier this month announced that it would delay all future scheduled deployments of the Oracle Cerner electronic health record system at VA hospitals until June 2023.

NOAA has approximately 12,000 employees but only a few hundred of them are commissioned officers who would be affected by the adoption of MHS Genesis.

The DOD, VA and Coast Guard all deploy the same Oracle Cerner Millennium platform, however, each agency has a different name for the system. The DOD calls its health records system MHS GENESIS, while the VA simply calls it the Electronic Health Records Modernization Program.

The VA’s EHRM system has been plagued by outages, and has caused major harm to some veterans who did not receive treatment because records disappeared in the computer system. 

Concerns over the impact of the system on patient care have been expressed by frontline medical staff, lawmakers and oversight bodies. Earlier this year, the VA’s Office of Inspector General published a trio of reports that identified major concerns about care coordination, ticketing and medication management associated with the EHR program launch.

Meanwhile, MHS GENESIS has faced outages and issues of its own, but not with the same frequency and scale as the VA’s EHRM rollout problems.

The VA signed on for Oracle Cerner’s Millennium EHR platform in May 2018, while the DOD started using the platform in 2015 and is further ahead with its system implementation.

The Defense Department had completed over half of its scheduled rollout for MHS Genesis in June of this year, and expects to deploy the system on time by the end of 2023.

The VA referred FedScoop to the FEHRM when asked for comment.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect comment from the Federal Electronic Health Records Modernization Office.

Dave Nyczepir contributed to this report.

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In a new report, the watchdog said that although it identified improvement since a previous audit in fiscal 2016, several agencies are still not meeting required and recommended assessment time frames.

Agencies with the highest median number of days before notifying applicants of an award include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (162), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (135) and the National Science Foundation (232)

According to a Small Business Administration policy directive issued in 2020, agencies are required to review proposals and notify applicants within 90 days after the closing date of a solicitation.

In addition, the directive recommends that agencies issue awards within 180 days of a closing date.

Congress and oversight bodies have sought to audit the length of time federal departments take to make awards to small businesses because they are more vulnerable to funding delays than larger enterprises.

Multiple administrations, including the Biden administration, have sought to use the purchasing power of the federal government to support small business innovation.

In its report, GAO recommended two actions: that the administrator of the SBA develop an action plan for improving its annual report to Congress on the issue, and that the SBA official add information on award timeliness to the public online award database.

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“The U.S. government is focused on increasing the depth, rigor, and creativity of its approach to application security testing, so that it sees and analyzes its applications as its adversaries do,” the agency said in a SAM.gov notice.

It added: “GSA is seeking information about the availability of Application Security Testing (AST) capabilities that support this effort, including manual expert analysis as well as automated tools, to discover security flaws in Federal applications and provide actionable results.”

The RFI comes as agencies across the federal government work to enhance application security through measures including the adoption of multi-factor authentication and moving networks to the cloud, in line with the Biden administration’s cybersecurity executive order.

Earlier this month, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chief Information Officer Zach Goldstein told FedScoop his agency was continuing to perform comparative analyses of MFA solutions for applications and devices.

Respondents have until Sept. 30 to answer questions posed by GSA through the RFI.

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The interview series, Cloud-Driven Innovation in Federal Government, underwritten by AWS, provided a platform for leaders to share their experience of tapping into the power of cloud computing.

Zach Goldstein, chief information officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that cloud has allowed his agency to “speed up the innovative process, and “transformation research to operations.”

One initiative they undertook for their internal users is to provide them access to high-performance compute capabilities in the cloud versus using on-prem servers, which minimizes the wait time for their research teams to test their ideas.

Additionally, they are improving the efficacy of public access to hurricane tracking data from the National Weather Center, Goldstein explains.

“What we did was we placed in front of both our weather.gov set of websites, and the noaa.gov set of websites — which includes National Hurricane Center, among others — we’ve put them behind cloud-based content delivery networks,” he shares. Those sites can get up to a billion hits in 24 hours during a hurricane event, and the new infrastructure has greatly contributed to NOAA’s ability to handle that traffic.

Cloud migration is an important step to modernize aging infrastructure and improve operational productivity, shares AWS’ DOD Director, Liz Martin. Her team partnered with the U.S. Navy and SAP NS2 to migrate their largest SAP enterprise resource planning system — comprised of 72,000 users spread across six U.S. naval commands.

“The milestone, which actually came in 10 months ahead of schedule,…will put the movement of documentation of some $70 billion worth of parts and goods into one accessible space so the information can be shared, analyzed and protected more uniformly. And the reports that were [previously] being run from the legacy system, and took five to six hours to complete, are now taking about 30 minutes,” she explains.

But these moves to the cloud have not been without their challenges. Ron Thompson, chief data officer and deputy digital transformation officer at NASA shares that his agency needed to work out how to get users access to data, without also providing access to internal information or systems.

“The cloud enabled us to actually store all of this archive information in one place — for both internal and external to NASA users — and it really helped us focus those containers in one place versus having two,” he explains.

For many of the leaders, the exercise of moving to the cloud held some valuable lessons. Dwayne Spriggs, service delivery director at the Dept. of Justice (DOJ) was surprised by the amount of technical debt their organization had accumulated.

“We realized, in working with some of our end-users and customers, that they workarounds they put in place…because the system couldn’t keep up with their business requirements. They had manual processes on top of the automated processes they were using, and that wasn’t captured anywhere. It was just something that was ingrained into institutional knowledge.”

One thing most executives pointed out was that the skills gap to implement cloud modernization initiatives continues to be their primary challenge. That’s why AWS is commiting resources to help fill those gaps, shares Dave Levy, VP, U.S. Federal Government, Nonprofit and Healthcare at AWS.

“By 2025, AWS will help 29 million people globally grow their technical skills with free cloud computing skills training. We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to people from all walks of life, and all levels of knowledge in more than 200 countries and territories around the world,” he shares.

Levy explains further that for AWS’ U.S. federal government partners they created an AWS government executive education program.

“It’s a four-day MBA style course for government leaders that shares insights from previous government transformations and digital transformation,” he says.

Other participants who shared their experiences in the video series include:

• Bill Daus, Chief, Research Directorate Systems Branch, National Science Foundation
• Brian Merrick, Director, Cloud Programs, Dept. of State
• Chris Johnson, Director of Cybersecurity Operations Cell, NGA
• Dave Peters, Associate CIO, Digital Infrastructure Services Center, USDA
• Kaschit Pandya, Deputy CIO, IT Operations, IRS
• Nagesh Rao, CIO, Bureau of Industry and Security, Dept. of Commerce
• Noell Rebelex, Cloud Services Program Director, Dept. of Labor
• Wei Luo, Deputy CIO, FEC

This video series was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by AWS.

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His appointment as director, announced by the agency on Wednesday, comes nearly 16 months after OSC’s last chief stepped down—and also as the office confronts weighty new responsibilities and prepares for what could be a massive budget boost proposed by President Joe Biden’s administration. 

“Richard DalBello officially starts his new role on May 9, 2022,” NOAA Spokesperson John Leslie told FedScoop on Thursday.

OSC has operated as the government’s main coordinator and hub for space commerce activities for decades, and Its key mission is to foster technological advancement within the commercial space industry. The office also maintains operating licenses for private space systems.

More recently though, the office’s responsibilities have expanded to include a greater focus on modernizing and managing America’s systems for space situational awareness.

An influential memorandum on space policy signed by former President Donald Trump in 2018 essentially transferred the authority of monitoring space traffic and warning of potential orbital collisions from the Defense Department to OSC, within NOAA and the Commerce Department. That switch came partly because the number of satellites, tools and debris in that realm is growing exponentially as space commercialization booms. With all those items increasingly hovering around Earth, the Pentagon opted to move on from that mandate so it could place an even deeper focus on its space-based national security missions. 

So far, Commerce has not acted so swiftly on this transition to governing Earth’s orbit, but Biden’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 commits roughly $88 million to OSC to make it happen. That marks an almost eight-fold increase from its 2021 enacted level of funding.

“This is an exciting opportunity and I appreciate the support and encouragement OSC is receiving from NOAA, the Department of Commerce, the White House and Congress,” DalBello said in the agency’s release. “Space safety and sustainability are two of the most critical issues facing the international community today and I am pleased the Biden administration has made these issues a priority.”

Having a new permanent director to help manage those millions, provided Congress approves that money, will also likely make a notable difference in this space surveillance operation. NOAA’s Leslie noted that the office’s last director, Kevin O’Connell, stepped down in January 2021, with the transition from Trump’s team to Biden’s. Mark Paese, the deputy assistant administrator of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, is serving as acting OSC director until DalBello assumes his fresh position. 

Leslie said the agency will share more information regarding DalBello’s early priorities after his first day on the job.

Former Chief of Staff at the National Space Council Jared Stout told FedScoop that he has known DalBello for nearly 10 years and that he is a “brilliant, dedicated and extremely hard-working” official.

Commenting on OSC’s evolving responsibilities, Stout added: “I think we are going to have to see, ultimately, what they decide to do with the funding, but my sincere hope is that the roles and responsibilities of the Office of Space Commerce will continue to grow and that Congress will continue to empower the office.”

DalBello will enter the position with more than 3 decades of experience in the space industry, according to his LinkedIn profile. From 2013 to 2015, he was OSTP’s lead for space and aeronautics under former President Barack Obama—a position he also held during the Clinton administration. Most recently, he was the vice president of government affairs at space consulting firm GXO. And prior to that, he served as Virgin Galactic’s vice president of business development and government affairs, among other roles.

Stout, who is now the director of congressional and regulatory policy at Meeks, Butera and Israel, said OSC’s first priority under its new leadership “absolutely must be to stand up the civil space situational awareness system as soon as possible, with U.S. industry leading the way.”

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