Sofar Ocean Technologies, Inc.

Purpose: the Primary End Goal of This Work Is to Establish a Comprehensive Initialization Strategy for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) Coupled Atmosphere-ocean Numerical Forecast Model That Specifically Targets Improving Probabilistic Skill Scores at Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) Forecast Lead Times of 2-8 Weeks. Recent Research Indicates That Ensemble Prediction Skill Scores (which Combine Prediction Accuracy and Uncertainty) Can Be Significantly Improved at Timescales of 1-8 Weeks by Ensuring That the Initial Ensemble Perturbations Project Onto the Oscillating Eigenfunctions of the Koopman (KM) and Perron-frobenius (PF) Operators. Practical Aspects of Applying the Method in an Operational Context Will Be Investigated by Incorporating This Approach in a Simplified Cycled Coupled Data Assimilation (CDA) Application, First With the Coupled Quasi-geostrophic (QG) Model and Then With a Low-resolution Ufs Coupled Model. Activities to Be Performed: the Researchers Will Develop a Coupl