The thing about the computing is that it has impacted the culture surrounding NWP model development within the American modeling community. At ECMWF, there is capacity in the primary systems to support R&D, so the total cost to the community to maintain this capability is much lower than in the US where everything is fragmented. If there was greater capacity for researchers to run GFS on the limited number of systems with first-class (or any) support, it may have helped consolidate the community.
Totally acknowledge that there are other takes here. And I have a bit of skepticism about how much EPIC will really achieve and what it can do to resolve these issues. But I don't necessarily agree that the science at EC is 5-10 years ahead of the American community's. What's matriculated R2O is definitely a few years ahead, of us, especially for medium-range forecasting. But the US likely still maintains a competitive edge in mesoscale/rapid refresh forecasting, and even though we've lost key developers to the private sector recently, the NBM seems (in my admittedly limited experience) to perform favorably to similar products out of ECMWF or other European national weather services.
Your point about ECMWF being fundamentally structured with the singular goal of improving the forecast is super important - I 100% agree with that, and the US has yet to do much of anything to address this.
Extremely valid points. Thanks for sharing your perspective, counters. It's much appreciated. One thing I think is fascinating, every time this comes up on a place like HN, is how detached the conversation often is from the meat-and-potatoes of forecasting. Which is to say I've seen many a googler think that weather forecasting is a simple problem and handwave the discussion away with "throw compute at the problem". It's always great when there are people around to ground the discussion.
Last point to the specifics. You're very right that the American teams have nailed mesoscale/rr forecasting. Which is, if we wanted to really divert the discussion, interesting and arguably more advanced because of its industrial applications (wind farms, etc et al).
I think your most salient point is about how the extra compute resources foster a culture of improvement on the models themselves. I am on the compute task team and it's something I argue for every day. Are you a researcher? If so, send me a message. I used to have my NOAA email in my profile but it would probably be neat to connect professionally.
Totally acknowledge that there are other takes here. And I have a bit of skepticism about how much EPIC will really achieve and what it can do to resolve these issues. But I don't necessarily agree that the science at EC is 5-10 years ahead of the American community's. What's matriculated R2O is definitely a few years ahead, of us, especially for medium-range forecasting. But the US likely still maintains a competitive edge in mesoscale/rapid refresh forecasting, and even though we've lost key developers to the private sector recently, the NBM seems (in my admittedly limited experience) to perform favorably to similar products out of ECMWF or other European national weather services.
Your point about ECMWF being fundamentally structured with the singular goal of improving the forecast is super important - I 100% agree with that, and the US has yet to do much of anything to address this.