NOAA’s Weather Program Office: Grants for Advanced Weather and Earth System Research

Eligible applicants are U.S. institutions of higher education; Cooperative Institutes; U.S.-based commercial organizations; state, local and Indian tribal governments in the U.S.; and U.S. non-profit organizations. No foreign (based outside of the U.S.) applicants may request funding. Federal employees and contractors proposing to perform work directly for NOAA may serve as co-Principal Investigators (co-PIs) or co-Investigators (co-Is) but are ineligible for their salary costs and are required to partner with one or more eligible non-federal institution(s) who would submit the application for the competition through Grants.gov per instructions in Section IV.G “Other Submission Requirements”. Restrictions on requesting federal employee salary and other costs are described in Section IV.F “Funding Restrictions”. Eligibility also depends on the statutory authority that permits NOAA to fund the proposed activity.
Any NOAA federal employee listed as a co-PI, co-I, or collaborator on the title page of a proposal (if eligible) must have provided explicit pre-approval to the PI to be identified as a contributor to the proposed project. Each collaborating NOAA federal institution (including NOAA centers, laboratories, and testbeds) should complete a NOAA Collaborator Acknowledgement Form (attached to this announcement; see Section IV.B.2.h) and attach it to the proposal upon submission.
All funded investigators must assure and verify if requested that they will not be allocated for greater than 100% of their annual employment time should their proposal be selected for funding. NOAA will verify this requirement if the proposal is recommended for funding.

NOAA’s Weather Program Office (WPO; formerly OWAQ, the Office of Weather and Air Quality) is soliciting proposals for weather, atmospheric composition, and earth system modeling and observations research reflecting multiple science objectives spanning time scales from hours to seasons, and from weather and water observations and earth system modeling to fire weather and social, behavioral, and economic science. There will be six grant competitions from this notification valued at approximately $16,500,000 per year as follows: 1) Fire Weather & Atmospheric Composition (FWAC), 2) Climate Testbed (CTB), 3) Weather Testbeds, 4) Joint Technology Transfer Initiative (JTTI), 5) Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) , and 6) Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment in the United States (VORTEX-USA).

In alignment with the Weather Forecasting and Innovation Act of 2017 (Public Law 115-25), the funded projects should improve the weather community’s understanding and ultimately its services of weather and water forecasting through engagement with the external scientific community on key science gaps of mutual interest. Through this funding opportunity, NOAA will support new weather, water, climate, earth system, and air quality observing and forecasting applications, including improved analysis techniques, better statistical or dynamic forecast models and techniques, and communication of that information to better inform the public. Forecast model improvements must focus on developing the Unified Forecast System (UFS), with an aim towards addressing forecaster priorities. These priorities were articulated in a recent series of workshops, and the top priorities are listed at https://www.weather.gov/media/sti/Final%20Consolidated%20Forecasters%20requests%20April%202021.pdf.

To achieve success with these objectives, selected projects should focus on advancing science and technology from the research stage to transitionable outputs or prototype products that NOAA or external partners could further develop into practical applications and operations. For the purposes of NOAA-funded projects, the maturity of projects is broadly classified using Readiness Levels (RLs), as adopted by NOAA and other federal agencies. The numerical RL scale from 1 to 9 is designed to track project maturity across the progressive spectrum from research to development to demonstration to deployment. RLs are defined in the context of NOAA’s overall process for transitioning funded research into operations, commercialization, or other applications in NOAA’s Policy on Research and Development Transitions described in NOAA Administrative Order 216-105B and in Section VIII. Additional information can be found in the Procedural Handbook for NOAA’s Policy on Research & Development Transitions at https://www.noaa.gov/organization/administration/nao-216-105b-policy-on-research-and development-transitions, or at the website for the OAR Office of Research, Transition, and Application (ORTA) at https://orta.research.noaa.gov/.

Depending on the program objectives, the individual competitions within this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) may favor projects at specific stages of maturity as signified by their estimated current RL. Program-specific project maturity considerations for funding are included in Section I.A “Program Objectives.” While all programs in this funding opportunity encourage an acceleration of research toward operationalization and/or other application, no program directly supports an actual research-to-NOAA operations transition (i.e., the RL 8-to-9 transition) itself; the funded projects are, however, expected to work with NOAA operational center representatives to develop strategies if future transitions to NOAA are anticipated.