This funding opportunity is being issued by the NOAA OAR Office of Weather and Air Quality (OWAQ).
There will be three separate competitions resulting from this announcement, one for each of the three high impact weather testbeds supported by OWAQ’s U. S. Weather Research Program (USWRP):
Joint
credit:
Hurricane Testbed (JHT), Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT), and the Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT).
These funding competitions will focus on new applied research, development, and demonstration of high impact weather and water research.
The ultimate goal (after the award ends and assuming NWS decides to accept it) would be NWS's transition of project outcomes to operational weather and water forecasting services in three to five years from now.
The High Impact Weather Testbed program, a component of the USWRP, supports projects that transition applied research to operations and services through close collaboration with NOAA.
Its focus is on mature projects that are ready or nearly ready to be tested in a NOAA quasi-operational forecasting environment through one of the above testbeds.
It is in these testbeds where project outcomes, such as new data or products, improved analysis techniques, or better statistical or dynamic models and forecast techniques, will be presented to operational forecasters in a quasi-operational environment (a testbed) and evaluated for potential future implementation in the NWS forecast offices at the local, regional, and/or national center levels to improve services to the public.
NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) is also announcing another separate federal funding opportunity that is a companion to this funding opportunity and similarly supports projects to transition new research to NWS operations through the Collaborative Science, Technology, and Applied Research (CSTAR) Program.
Please search for funding opportunity number NOAA-NWS-NWSPO-2017-2004957 in grants.gov.
The current OAR testbed funding opportunity supports mature projects that are ready or nearly ready for testbed collaborations and demonstrations, while testbed demonstrations are not required with the CSTAR funding opportunity.