2024 was a big year for JCSDA with the launch of our space weather data assimilation project, several spack-stack releases that now support 14 HPC platforms and AWS cloud services, and the conclusion of JCSDA’s Disaster Relief Appropriations Supplemental (DRAS) project with exceptional success.

A bipartisan Dear Colleague Letter with 24 signatures has been sent to the Speaker, Minority Leader, and Appropriations Committee Chair and Ranking Member of the House of Representatives requesting funding for weather prediction innovation in any disaster supplemental or upcoming appropriations bills for science and technology, specifically highlighting the importance of JCSDA and JEDI to the next generation of forecast models.

Last month the JCSDA held a code sprint to begin standardizing variable names across JEDI, updating the generic code to match naming standards also adopted by the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP). This ensures that the JEDI data assimilation remains model agnostic, eliminates unnecessary code duplication, and ensures consistency across all JEDI model interfaces.

Learn more about the career and work of our SOCA team lead, Travis Sluka!

With recent advances, JEDI can now perform variational (2DVar) data assimilation for snow depth analysis. The flexibility of JEDI and the generic implementations of data assimilation algorithms (in OOPS) and background error covariances (in SABER, System Agnostic Background Error Representation) enabled a rapid development of this system for snow depth analysis. 

In 2019 JCSDA was awarded a Disaster Relief Appropriations Supplemental (DRAS) grant from NOAA to accelerate JEDI development and integration, with an emphasis on connecting that development to operational use and systems. The main goals were to accelerate towards use in operational NWS production suites, improving R2O and O2R, and advancing tools for use of observations, all of which were accomplished.

Dr. Pubali Mukherjee, a postdoc at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami, FL, spent last week in Boulder working with JCSDA’s Dr. Travis Sluka on JEDI (Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration) ocean data assimilation

Adding MPAS experiments to Skylab not only expands Skylab’s functionality, it also allows the team to check that Skylab is being built to be model-agnostic as intended; JEDI and Skylab are both designed to work with all climate and weather models, requiring only a small amount of model-specific code to interface with each while the vast majority of Skylab and JEDI components are generic and remain the same from model to mod

On August 28-29 JCSDA hosted the JEDI Space Weather Data Assimilation Workshop in Boulder, CO, with attendees from across all of our partners, academia, and industry.

On September 12-18 JCSDA and COSMIC jointly hosted the 10th meeting of the International Radio Occultation Working Group (IROWG) at UCAR Center Green in Boulder, Colorado. JCSDA’s Hui Shao, co-chair of IROWG, Ben Ruston, the OBS lead, and COSMIC’s director, Jan Weiss, formed the local organizing committee with the support team from UCAR.

On July 18 the JCSDA team met with our partners at NASA, NOAA, US Navy, US Air Force, and the UK Met Office to celebrate the last quarter of accomplishments and discuss goals for the upcoming quarter and year. Q1 milestones included beginning our space weather program and the establishment of a new model interface team.

JEDI SkyLab can now conduct experiments with newly-published data, adding near-real-time (NRT) data assimilation to its suite of accomplishments.

This week JCSDA’s Eric Lingerfelt gave a 20 minute talk at the International Conference on Computational Science in Malaga, Spain. He presented the Research Repository for Data and Diagnostics (R2D2) component of the Joint Effort for Data Assimilation (JEDI) in the conference’s thematic track “Advances in High-Performance Computational Earth Sciences: Numerical Methods, Frameworks & Applications”.

The Polarized Submillimeter Ice-Cloud Radiometer (PolSIR) is an upcoming NASA satellite mission scheduled for launch in 2027, designed to study the elusive role of ice clouds in Earth’s weather and climate systems. In support of this innovative satellite mission, the PolSIR sensor will be simulated by the Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM).

In a recent collaborative effort between the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) and the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), we have successfully integrated the newly released Level 2 TEMPO NO2 products into the JEDI data assimilation system using the GEOS-CF model at C360/~25km resolution (the background and the analysis are at the same resolution). This initiative demonstrates the enhanced capability to monitor and produce analyses of atmospheric composition less than 24 hours after official product release, focusing on NO2, a significant pollutant and tracer for air quality.

In the past couple of months the JEDI effort has incorporate two fixes that amount to a world of difference in the process of transitioning GEOS from the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis to JEDI.

Recently a bug discovered by the UK Met Office and resolved by the JEDI team fixed an issue with NASA’s JEDI system, definitively proving the advantages of generic code and interagency cooperation. 

On April 18 the JCSDA team met with our partners at NASA, NOAA, US Navy, US Air Force, and the UK Met Office to celebrate the last quarter of accomplishments and discuss goals for the upcoming quarter and AOP year. Q4 accomplishments included several important bugfixes, new sensors, and several experiments added to SkyLab v8!

Earlier this month JCSDA’s Cheng Dang joined Bill Kuo, UCP Director, and Mohan Ramamurthy, Director of EODS Center and Unidata, on a four day visit to Utah State University and the University of Utah. Along with presentations and seminars about JCSDA for the students, they met with faculty using JEDI and data assimilation in their own research.

In quarter four Eric Lingerfelt, Evan Parker, and Dom Heinzeller from the JCSDA core team and Tariq Hamzey from NASA GMAO met in Boulder for a code sprint to redesign R2D2 into a scalable, flexible client/server system.

JCSDA is pleased to announce the release of Skylab 8.0!

JCSDA SkyLab 8.0 is the eighth  roll-up release that provides integrated Earth System Data Assimilation capability.

On Thursday, January 25, the JCSDA core team and partners from NOAA, NASA, U.S. Navy and Air Force, and the UK Met Office met virtually and in-person to review accomplishments from the last three months and discuss future goals. This quarter saw a lot  of functionality added to SkyLab with the release of SkyLab v7, two spack-stack releases, numerous additional  sensors, and much more!

The JCSDA is pleased to announce the release of Skylab 7.0!

JCSDA SkyLab 7.0 is the seventh roll-up release that provides integrated Earth System Data Assimilation capability. All JEDI code is open source and publicly available at https://github.com/JCSDA. Capabilities are demonstrated via the SkyLab testbed experiments conducted internally at JCSDA for the following components

We are pleased to announce the 20th JCSDA Technical Review Meeting and Science Workshop will be held at UCAR's Center Green facility in Boulder Colorado on May 14-17, 2024. The theme for this year is Earth System Data Assimilation, with representation from various communities

The first phase of transitioning the NASA GMAO GEOS atmospheric data assimilation capabilities to JEDI involves the replacement of the Grid-point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) with a corresponding JEDI analysis. This includes taking JEDI's Unified Observation Operator (UFO), its underlying dependencies, and the JEDI solver that enables a hybrid 4DEnVar strategy similar to what is used in the current GEOS-GSI system.

2023 was a great year for JCSDA, with three Skylab releases, 8 spack-stack releases, and big steps towards operations. Our biggest highlights:

The JCSDA team came from across the country to meet in Boulder, Colorado, in the last week of October, renewing cross-team ties and planning for the JEDI-Skylab developments ahead.

On Thursday, October 26, the JCSDA core team and partners at NOAA, NASA, U.S. Navy and Air Force, and the UK Met Office met virtually and in-person to go over accomplishments from the last three months and discuss future goals. Exciting milestones include two partners passing thresholds for JEDI operations and spack-stack 1.5.0 being officially put into use by UFS!

On the 26th to the 28th of September, 2023, the International Earth Surface Working Group (IESWG) convened a hybrid meeting with the in-person component at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, Finland. JCSDA’s Dr. Benjamin Ruston co-chaired and facilitated the running of the meeting.

The JCSDA is pleased to announce the release of Skylab 6.0!

JCSDA SkyLab 6.0 is the sixth roll-up release that provides integrated Earth System Data Assimilation capability.