EPIC is the catalyst for the Unified Forecast System (UFS). It provides the technical support, cloud computing infrastructure, and software engineering expertise needed to allow the public to run and improve NOAA’s models. It is the “IT department” for the entire American weather research enterprise.
Historically, running a weather model required a multi-million dollar supercomputer. EPIC has moved the UFS into the cloud (AWS/Azure/Google). Professionals search for “EPIC Cloud Sandboxes” to find pre-configured environments where they can run a full hurricane model on their laptop using cloud-bursting credits, democratizing high-end research for small universities and startups.
To solve specific “bugs” in the model code, EPIC hosts regular virtual hackathons. Industry pros search for “EPIC Hackathon 2026 themes” to participate in challenges like “Improving Sea Ice Data Ingestion” or “Optimizing GPU Code.” These events are a primary way that private-sector developers get noticed by NOAA recruiters and major defense contractors.
EPIC focuses on “Research to Operations” (R2O) and back again (O2R). Searching this term leads to the “Unified Forecast System Portal,” which tracks how a piece of code written by a grad student eventually becomes part of the daily weather forecast. This transparency is intended to break down the “silos” that once separated government scientists from academic researchers.