NOAA has selected Tomorrow.io to lead the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), the program charged with advancing the accuracy of America’s operational weather models and speeding the path from research to operations. The five-year, $49 million single-award IDIQ makes Tomorrow.io the prime contractor on a program the company supported during its first phase.
The Award
NOAA’s Weather Program Office selected Tomorrow.io from a field of 13 bidders. Under the contract, Tomorrow.io will provide the scientific and technical support behind EPIC: software and infrastructure engineering, code management and systems integration, data management, performance tracking, and the user support and community engagement that keep the Unified Forecast System open to the researchers improving it.
“EPIC is where the country decides how quickly good science turns into a better forecast,” said Thomas Cavett, VP of US Federal at Tomorrow.io. “American forecast superiority is a real national objective, and this is the program built to deliver it. Being chosen to lead it reflects years of work alongside NOAA and a team that understands what operational forecasting actually demands.”
What EPIC Is
Congress created EPIC through the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017 with a direct mandate: reclaim and hold American leadership in numerical weather prediction. Its method is openness. EPIC moved NOAA’s operational forecast code into public repositories so that scientists at universities, in government labs, and across industry can contribute improvements to the same model the National Weather Service runs every day.
That is a structural change in how a national forecast system gets built. It replaces a closed development pipeline with a community one, and it is the reason EPIC’s tagline is accelerating innovation through community modeling.
The Problem EPIC Was Built to Solve
The hardest problem in operational weather prediction is not generating good science. It is getting good science into the model.
A promising advance can sit in the literature for years before it reaches the code that produces public forecasts. Every year it waits is a year of forecasts that could have been better. That lag, more than any shortage of research, is what has allowed other national modeling centers to outpace the United States at points over the past two decades.
EPIC exists to compress that lag. The work is unglamorous and it is measured in infrastructure, testing, documentation, and support rather than headlines. It is also the difference between research that improves a forecast and research that does not.
The Team
Tomorrow.io leads EPIC as prime contractor and is proud to be joined by Booz Allen Hamilton, Element 84, Redline, and DeVine. Together the team brings the modeling science, software engineering, and community support experience the program runs on.
The company brings operational modeling experience of its own. Tomorrow.io runs a full forecasting stack in production every day, and its Chief Weather Officer, Dr. Arun Chawla, previously led the branch at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center responsible for transitioning models into operations, the exact problem EPIC was created to address.
What Comes Next
Over the next five years, Tomorrow.io will focus EPIC on advancing the Unified Forecast System and deepening the collaboration between NOAA, academia, and industry that carries new science into operations. Better models are the foundation every forecast rests on. Improving them in the open, with the whole weather enterprise contributing, is how the American model gets to be the best in the world.
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