# Marine Meteorology

**R-2A activity** of project 0000 — Ocean Wrfghtg Env Applied Res  
**Program element:** 0602435N — Ocean Wrfghtg Env Applied Res  
**Component:** U.S. Navy · **Budget Activity:** 2  
**Vintage:** President's Budget PB2027  
**Canonical URL:** https://hitchintel.com/programs/0602435N/0000/a2  
**Parent:** https://hitchintel.com/programs/0602435N/0000

## Summary

This activity requests $26.7M in FY2027, 41% of project 0000, up 6.4% on FY2026. The R-2A exhibit describes it across FY2026–FY2027, including what the FY2027 money is planned to buy.

## What the FY2027 request buys

**FY2027 planned work.** - Continue the development of new decision aids that take weather and extremes into account for improved ship routing, fuel efficiency, and bases and infrastructure protection and optimization. - Continue collection of field observations; quality control and process-oriented analyses; and development of data assimilation and modeling technologies. Continue Unified Data Assimilation initiative to improve data assimilation technologies across the atmosphere, thermosphere, ocean, wave, and sea ice sub-disciplines - Continue applied research and studies aimed at increasing knowledge content of data from remote sensing and through-the-sensor systems as well as improving the representation of dynamical and physical processes, coupled atmosphere/thermosphere/ocean/wave/ice/land processes, atmospheric predictability, and methodologies for probabilistic forecasting and characterization of uncertainty. These studies include efforts to develop appropriate techniques to obtain atmospheric environmental data from airborne and space-borne sensors. - Continue to improve Naval simulation and prediction capabilities of the dynamic and thermodynamic processes in the atmosphere and ocean on a wide spectrum of scales, and to quantify and better represent the uncertainty in these predictions. This includes improvements to the forecast models, as well as improvements to ensemble forecast systems, which provide uncertainty estimates of forecasts and probabilistic predictions of particular events. As the Navy conducts a significant portion of its operations near the ocean surface up to a height of several thousand feet above the surface, in a region typically known as the atmospheric boundary layer, it is critical that our simulation and prediction capabilities of the dynamic and thermodynamic processes in this region, as well as new and emerging observational capabilities such as unmanned vehicles, are accurate - Continue the development of utilizing low order models based on machine learning techniques to provide advanced computational efficiency for large member ensemble prediction systems. - Continue research into improved analysis and prediction of Atmospheric Rivers and the impacts on extreme and hazardous weather internationally in areas of Navy and Marine Corps operations. - Continue research into atmospheric gravity wave (AGW) propagation into the mesosphere from convective weather and coupling into Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances (TID) and the effects of these waves on OTH radars and VLF, HF and UHF communication. - Continue Unified Data Assimilation initiative to improve data assimilation technologies across the atmosphere, thermosphere, ocean, wave, and sea ice sub-disciplines - Continue efforts focused on parameters that affect Radar, Radio Communications, Imaging Sensors, and Laser propagation in the marine environment with the goal of representing the real current and forecast atmosphere in tactical decision aids. - Continue to extend research of boundary layer processes, focusing on impact to state variables and their gradients. - Complete improved characterization of clouds, aerosols, and optical turbulence as they affect propagation of high energy laser systems. - Complete development of improved tropical cyclone forecast models to more accurately predict the rapid intensification of strong tropical cyclones. -Initiate research to improve our observing data, data assimilation techniques, and algorithmic analysis of storm structure and character to better understand and predict phenomenology. - Continue efforts on the design, performance, analysis and underlying theory of global-to-tactical scale numerical simulations specifically designed to represent atmospheric environmental processes and phenomena. - Complete investigations on land surface impacts to predictability of boundary layer processes on weather from weekly to sub-seasonal timescales using Navy atmospheric models and predictability tools to quantify feedback and affects.

**FY2026 to FY2027 change.** Funding increase from FY 2026 to FY 2027 is due to increased research in development of new decision aids that take weather and extremes into account for improved ship routing, fuel efficiency, and bases and infrastructure protection and optimization and the collection of field observations.

## Before the request year

**FY2026 plans — current year.** Continue developing weather/extremes decision aids for ship routing, fuel efficiency, infrastructure protection. Continue field observations, quality control/analyses, data assimilation/modeling technologies. Continue Unified Data Assimilation across atmosphere, thermosphere, ocean, wave, sea ice. Continue applied research to increase knowledge content of remote sensing data, improve representation of processes, coupled systems, predictability, probabilistic forecasting, uncertainty. Develop techniques to obtain atmospheric data from sensors. Continue improving Naval simulation/prediction of atmosphere/ocean processes across scales, quantify/represent uncertainty. Improves forecast models/ensemble systems. Critical for boundary layer simulation, & emerging observational capabilities. Complete exploration of fleet EO/IR sensors for atmospheric aerosol, water vapor, and turbulence estimation for high energy laser applications. Continue developing low order models based on machine learning for efficient ensemble prediction systems. Continue research into improved analysis/prediction of Atmospheric Rivers & impacts on extreme weather in Navy/Marine Corps areas. Continue research into atmospheric gravity wave propagation into mesosphere from convection, coupling into Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances, & effects on radars & communications. Complete a study on forecast skill vs. lead time across model approaches for seamless decision support. Continue Unified Data Assimilation to improve technologies across atmosphere, thermosphere, ocean, wave, sea ice. Continue efforts focused on parameters affecting Radar, Radio Communications, Imaging Sensors, and Laser propagation in the marine environment for tactical decision aids. Continue to extend research of boundary layer processes, focusing on impact to state variables/gradients. Continue improved characterization of clouds, aerosols, and optical turbulence for high energy laser systems. Continue developing/improving tropical cyclone forecast models for rapid intensification. Shift to leveraging data, assimilation, algorithmic analysis for understanding. Continue efforts on design, performance, analysis, theory of numerical simulations representing atmospheric processes. Continue to investigate land surface impacts on boundary layer processes using Navy models.

## Funding

| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 19.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 25.1 |
| FY2027 | Request | 26.7 |

> Prior, current and budget year only — an R-2A activity carries no five-year plan. It sums exactly into its project in the request year and not necessarily in any other.

## Other activities in project 0000

- [Task Force Ocean (formerly Ocean Acoustics)](https://hitchintel.com/programs/0602435N/0000/a4) — FY2027 19.2
- National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) — FY2027 5.9
- Coastal Geosciences/Optics — FY2027 5.7
- Physical Oceanography — FY2027 4.7
- Marine Biology — FY2027 2.5

## Source & machine access

- **Source:** FY2027 Department of the Navy RDT&E Budget Justification, Exhibit R-2A, PE 0602435N project 0000 (PB PB2027). Narrative is the government's own text.
- **No marks, no contractors at this grain** — congressional marks land on the program element and R-3 performers on the project.
- **MCP:** `mcp.hitchintel.com` — `budget_get_activity`.

*HitchAI is an independent intelligence service, not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense. Budget figures are requests/estimates, not obligations.*