Latest News

NOAA’s Fire Weather Testbed (FWT) has completed a major facility upgrade, unveiling new furniture, dynamic signage, and advanced display systems to strengthen its role as a hub for fire weather innovation and a trusted resource for the wildland fire community. GSL’s updated Fire Weather Testbed layout, including new mission control...

NOAA’s Line Office Transition Managers Committee (LOTMC) has published its Fiscal Year 2024 NOAA Annual Transition Report, led by the NOAA Office of Research, Transition, and Application (ORTA). This inaugural report summarizes each fiscal year’s wide range of research and development projects that NOAA transitions to operations, applications, commercialization, or...

A new, mobile fire weather observing system that can be quickly deployed to wildfire-prone regions to monitor how weather conditions contribute to fire ignition risk and behavior is undergoing testing and collecting data on a site near Boulder, Colorado. The mobile system, called “Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System” (CLAMPS),...

Wildfire was once a seasonal concern primarily for the western United States and Great Plains. It has now become a year-round threat in many parts of the country, devastating communities, impacting air quality, and reshaping landscapes. In the face of the escalating risk, scientists at NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory (GSL)...

NOAA’s Fire Weather Testbed (FWT) has released a report detailing its comprehensive evaluation of an innovative end-to-end workflow to address the wildfire warning gap. As wildland fires increasingly impact communities with devastating outcomes, they reinforce an urgent need to close the warning gap between ignition and public alert. To...

Introducing the DESI Digest! NOAA’s Dynamic Ensemble-based Scenarios for IDSS (DESI) is a cutting-edge research tool empowering forecasters to explore a vast array of potential weather scenarios. DESI delivers customizable displays of high-resolution guidance, crucial for risk-based decision-making and fostering collaboration between researchers and operational partners. The DESI Digest...

NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) is breaking new ground in weather prediction with the development of HRRR-Cast, NOAA’s first data-driven, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered regional forecasting system. This innovative project, a key component of NOAA’s broader Project EAGLE (Experimental Artificial intelligence Global and Limited area Ensemble) system, represents a significant...

Researchers at the NOAA Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) have completed the first comprehensive evaluation of one of GSL’s flagship decision-support tools. The Dynamic Ensemble-based Scenarios for Impact-based Decision-Support Services (DESI) is a web-based application that allows meteorologists and other users to explore ensemble weather model data and extract probabilistic information...

Emergency responders in central Florida navigating flooding resulting from storm surge during Hurricane Ian in 2022. Source: NOAA/NHC Hurricane Ian Tropical Cyclone Report. Image Credit: Phelan M. Ebenhack/EBENP, via Associated Press The deadliest hazard from tropical storms and hurricanes isn’t wind – it’s storm surge and the flooding that follows....

GSL’s model developers and evaluators have been hard at work testing, advancing, and planning the next generation of numerical weather prediction models. Recently, this has included taking a leading role at a recent workshop for the scientific community and making significant contributions to recent releases of two major atmospheric modeling...

On June 6, 2025, NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) hosted a workshop led by the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Sensing and Computation for Environmental Decision-making Engine (NSF ASCEND Engine) in Colorado and Wyoming. The hybrid workshop, with virtual and on-site participation at the Fire Weather Testbed on NOAA’s Boulder campus,...

NOAA Research has announced the 2025 recipients of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Outstanding Scientific Paper Awards. This year, two of the eight outstanding papers included significant contributions by GSL scientists, including one landmark paper led by the lab. Annually, OAR recognizes several significant scientific publications and...

As part of its commitment to advancing meteorological observations and modeling systems, GSL has developed a new tool to process measurements taken at field sites worldwide, and delivered it to two major partners. The new algorithm, called the Tropospheric Remotely Observed Profiling via Optimal Estimation (TROPoe), derives vertical profiles of...

Experimental RRFS-Smoke model forecast for vertically-integrated smoke concentration on June 3, 2025. Days before the Midwest and Eastern regions of the U.S. were impacted by dense smoke, haze, and poor air quality, GSL’s Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) Smoke model drew forecaster attention to the potential spread of the smoke...

DESI display of RRFS forecast wind speeds over North America. RRFS’s North America domain allows for high-resolution weather prediction across the entire continent and surrounding oceans. Image credit: NOAA GSL. GSL has released its latest update to the powerful Dynamic Ensemble Scenarios for Impact-Based Decision Support (DESI) tool on both...

NOAA has signed an agreement with Sky Miles Limited, a Bahamian company, for GSL to develop and install an advanced aviation forecast system. This system will improve flight safety for airlines flying to or through the island nation’s airspace, off the United States southeast coast, and the surrounding Caribbean...

GSL scientists spent part of this spring mentoring five Metropolitan State University at Denver (“MSU Denver”) undergraduate students through an internship program supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Colorado-Wyoming (CO-WY) Engine.  The internship is funded by the NSF Advanced Sensing and Computation for Environmental Decision-making (ASCEND)...

A new upgrade of the Unified Forecast System’s (UFS) Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application, which was released by the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) in April 2025, contains significant contributions from the NOAA Global Systems Laboratory (GSL). The update (Version 3.0) adds new capabilities for modeling wildfire smoke and dust for weather model developers...

From March 13 to 16, 2025, a historic and deadly tornado outbreak swept across the central United States, unleashing severe weather from the Gulf Coast to central Illinois. The storm system produced more than 115 confirmed tornadoes, and resulted in $6.25 billion in damage and 23 fatalities, making it one...

NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) has released a significant update to the Dynamic Ensemble-based Scenarios for Impact-Based Decision Support (DESI). The latest release, Version 3.3, launched in February 2025 and incorporates a host of improvements aimed at enhancing usability, visualization, and its suite of critical environmental data. Recent releases have offered...