NOAA seeks to improve weather forecasting through cloud migration

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in the middle of moving multiple systems to cloud-based technologies to improve weather forecasting. 

NOAA operates two physical supercomputers for the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, or WCOSS. The agency uses the system to generate weather models used across NOAA offices and shared with the general public.

The two supercomputers are serviceable for about five years, but NOAA is now “pushing the limits” of what physical infrastructure can handle, David Michaud, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction Central Operations, told Nextgov/FCW.

To move information off of the supercomputers to NOAA’s 122 local weather forecast offices, the agency may have to reduce data size, Michaud said. For example, three-dimensional weather models present different variables about the Earth’s surface and layers of the atmosphere. But to get the data to offices, specific variables and layers may have to be omitted, Michaud explained.

“Trapped data is actually probably not my biggest problem. It's actually data that we've deleted and will never get back,” Neil Jacobs, NOAA administrator, said at the Google Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. 

To solve this, NOAA is shifting high-performance computing operations from on-premises hardware to the cloud. 

While the two WCOSS supercomputers each operate at a speed of 14.5 petaflops, they are difficult to modify. With a cloud-based computing solution, NOAA can more easily adapt its technology as weather modeling evolves, Michaud explained.

NOAA aims to have a “full-scale system” for high-performance computing operations available by the end of 2026, with a go-live by the end of 2027, Michaud said. 

The agency is currently learning how the cloud works with its weather models and determining how it wants to configure the cloud, he added. Google Cloud is the primary provider of high-performance computing operations for NOAA’s WCOSS modernization project.

“For the NOAA workforce, the move to cloud [high-performance computing] provides a more streamlined, flexible environment, enabling meteorologists and researchers to quickly adapt future modeling innovations,” Brent Mitchell, vice president of go-to-market at Google Public Sector, wrote in a blog post.

NOAA’s move to the cloud extends beyond the WCOSS. 

Jacobs said that National Weather Service forecasters currently have to download data using Linux workstations in their offices and process the data locally. If issues such as an office evacuation arise, other offices have to cover for forecasters’ work. And if NOAA upgrades the resolution of weather models, forecasters don’t get that data until later, he said.

To resolve these issues, NOAA announced it would move the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System to cloud-based technologies by early 2028, allowing NWS forecasters to access data — such as forecasts and warnings — miles away from their offices, according to a NOAA news release.