Next Generation Water Prediction Capability

The purpose of a Sources Sought (SS) is to improve small business access to acquisition information and to enhance competition by identifying contracting and subcontracting opportunities. The Government may use the information obtained from this notice to gain insight into industry capabilities and other market information. In order to gather information from industry, the agency is requesting industry to submit a response to the questions listed in the below Google Form link. The hyperlink is also found at the end of this notice: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTVq1m7zWb5_1qfwv04RcPdIKT-T4gzfElyiReUN6EWEzHIg/viewform?usp=sf_link

(A PDF of the Google Form is attached for reference only, so that respondents may review all questions at once and prepare responses prior to completing the Google Form.  Respondents are requested to still submit a response via the Google Form link.)

NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) is taking steps to enhance analysis and prediction of the nation’s water resources, ranging from forecasts of floods to yearlong water supply, to the potential quality of water along the coasts in the context of an ongoing effort to improve impact-based decision support services.

Specifically, NWS’s Office of Water Prediction (OWP) has a need for Information Technology (IT) expertise in engineering, technical, and system support, including program/project management, data collection, and operational software development and delivery. This required support will enable OWP to provide operational delivery of science-based, integrated, consistent, timely, reliable, and accurate water resources monitoring, prediction, and diagnostic information to the nation.

The Government will not provide on-site facilities for the day-to-day execution of this work. All work will occur at the contractor’s facilities. Periodic on-site support at the facilities listed in the Performance Work Statement (PWS) is expected.

As further detailed in the PWS, the scope over the lifetime of this requirement is to:

1. Develop a domain science-friendly Next Generation Water Resources Modeling (NextGen) Framework; state-of-the-science hydrologic and hydraulic model formulations that function within the NextGen Framework; and a configuration, testing, calibration, and evaluation environment that allows OWP to optimize the skill of the NWM and FIM Services. The framework, formulations, and optimization environment will support the operational implementation of the NWM beginning in 2025 and will be updated on an annual basis thereafter. The NWM must be underpinned by a common hydrofabric that also supports FIM.

2. Improve the delivery of comprehensive and real-time FIM capabilities and services which facilitate the provisioning of Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS). These services support a wide range of applications including emergency response before, during, and after floods by depicting when, where, and how infrastructure will be impacted.

3. Develop and leverage standards and best practices to produce an enterprise hydrofabric solution that supports both NWM and FIM model formulations and capabilities. A hydrofabric is an internally consistent, georeferenced digital representation of the hydrologically and/or hydraulically significant features of the land surface/subsurface. It includes terrain and bathymetric topography, topographical and topological catchments, stream vectors, waterbodies, etc., and spatially-varied land-surface properties or derived parameters.

The PWS is attached to the sam.gov posting to provide additional context to the capability areas described within this SS. 

Please be advised that your participation in this SS is not required to ensure participation in future solicitations and contract awards. Participation is this SS is voluntary and the Government will not reimburse participants for any expenses associated with their participation in this SS. There is no commitment by the Government to issue a solicitation as a result of this SS. Responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. Respondents will not be notified of the result of the review.

For informational purposes only, this sources sought notice is related to the previously posted Request for Information (RFI) (Notice ID NWSOWPNWM) titled Advances in NOAA's Next Generation National Water Model Framework and Flood Inundation Mapping which can be found here: https://sam.gov/opp/82d86024406d4e12badb578a5befdbec/view