Latest News

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...

NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory and Global Systems Laboratory and the artificial intelligence startup Brightband have entered into a two-year Cooperative Research And Development Agreement (CRADA) that will optimize a vast NOAA-managed archive of observational weather data for training artificial intelligence (AI)-based weather forecasting applications. Under the CRADA, “Making NOAA Observation Data Artificial Intelligence-Ready,” NOAA will...

Weather touches every part of our lives–our flights, utility bills, commutes, work days, soccer games, and even our moods. For over a half century, NOAA has been studying the skies to better understand how our atmosphere works. Our efforts have led to rapid advances in weather detection and atmospheric...

Hurricane Helene taken from GOES 16, Image from of CIRA Several NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Offices (NWS WFOs), including Charleston, SC (CHS) have been testing the latest version of Hazard Services for convective operations. The WFO issued 39 tornado warnings, 28 special marine warnings for waterspouts, and dozens of...

GSL scientists will present at the AMS 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms October 21-24 in Virginia Beach, VA. The conference is the premiere gathering for scientists, forecasters, educators, and communicators engaged in all aspects of work related to hazardous deep convective weather phenomena. The theme for this year...

From its inception as an experiment to improve forecasts for aviation, GSL is thrilled to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the pioneering High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) weather model’s transition to NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) operations. Since September 30, 2014, GSL has delivered four major upgrades to the HRRR...

On October 1, 2024 Hazard Services winter weather and non-precipitation hazard functions went live in all NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Offices across the nation. GSL leads the development of Hazard Services, a multi-year, multi-phase, multi-partner effort to streamline the process to create a hazardous weather watch, warning, or...

GSL and the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) have achieved a milestone with the release of the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) v7.0.0! The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) is a state-of-the-art infrastructure designed to facilitate community-wide development of atmospheric physics parameterizations across different host weather and climate models. The CCPP...

NOAA GSL and partners CIRES/CU Boulder and University of Nebraska – Lincoln have used Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) to analyze the impacts of Uncrewed Aircraft Observations on weather models and their forecasts. Many high-impact weather phenomena such as thunderstorm initiation, tornadoes, fog, wildfires and precipitation are tied to processes...

NOAA Global Systems Laboratory hosted the first in-person evaluation in the new NOAA Fire Weather Testbed (FWT) in June. Forecasters from NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) were paired with state forestry partners and trained on a new wildland fire detection and monitoring tool in the Next Generation Fire System (NGFS),...

On June 14, the Pittsburgh NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Office (NWSFO) issued the first-ever real-time Severe Thunderstorm Warning using GSL-developed Hazard Services software. The warning alerted more than 32,000 residents across eastern Ohio to the imminent threat of severe weather. This work is part of the NWS’s ongoing transition...

In Hazard Services, users evaluated gridded wind, wave, and visibility forecasts, as well as analyses of synoptic features, creating a polygon “hazard” area in a format that can automatically be imported into navigational display systems. Similar gridded forecasts will be available for freezing spray forecasts. Hazard Services is an...

NOAA GSL has released a new version of the Dynamic Ensemble-based Scenarios for Impact-based Decision Support (DESI), a powerful tool for ensemble-based weather forecast information and visualization. DESI 3.1 builds on the additions from version 3.0 to give NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists the tools to better serve their...

NOAA GSL, Global Monitoring Lab (GML), Air Resources Lab (ARL), and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) scientists surveyed possible new observation sites near Flagstaff, Arizona for fire weather research. Flagstaff was impacted by three wildfires in June of 2022 that caused the evacuation of hundreds of residents....

Meet our summer interns! Chuck Baker (University of Maryland) (Dave Turner, Jason English) My path to GSL has been shaped by extensive work in atmospheric research, particularly on the planetary boundary layer (PBL). At NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory (ARL), I developed strong skills in data analysis and model...

GSL participated in the 2024 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecast Experiment during May with several experimental models under the microscope. The primary goals of the NOAA HWT are to accelerate the transfer of promising new tools from research to operations, inspire new initiatives for operationally relevant research, and identify...

A record 62 tornado warnings were issued by the NOAA NWS forecast office in Norman, Oklahoma during the April 27-28 tornado outbreak. With current software, the forecaster draws a warning polygon that is stationary and constrained to its original area; it can only be reduced in size, not expanded. If...

More than 500 female junior and senior high school students from across Wyoming state participated in the Women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) Conference (WiSTEM) on the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie on Tuesday, May 14. This was the 24th year of the WiSTEM conference, designed to...