UCAR Sources Sought Solicitation Questions .docx

Sources Sought Questions Instructions:

When providing responses to the questions below, interested parties shall provide sufficient, specific information to demonstrate their current capability to meet the IDIQ PWS requirements. General statements of corporate experience, future hiring plans, or assertions that the respondent can perform the work without supporting evidence may be considered insufficient. The Government will evaluate responses to determine whether any source is capable of meeting the requirement without unacceptable technical, operational, schedule, cybersecurity, or cost risk.

1. Unified software-system stewardship Describe your organization’s current, demonstrated ability to provide coordinated stewardship, governance, release management, configuration management, scientific planning, and software integration for MPAS, MET/METplus, and JEDI, or technically comparable interdependent NWP, data-assimilation, and verification software systems.

Address your organization’s present role and authority, if any, in maintaining or releasing the applicable code baselines; the repositories, infrastructure, agreements, and technical personnel available to perform this work; and how you would ensure compatible, synchronized development and releases across all three systems.

2. Large scientific-code-base experience Provide examples of completed or ongoing work in which your organization had primary responsibility for developing, sustaining, integrating, or releasing large scientific software code bases using Python, Fortran, C++, or comparable languages.

For each example, identify the customer or sponsoring organization, period of performance, your organization’s role, relevant code-base scope and complexity, high-performance computing or cloud environment, configuration-management approach, and measurable outcome.

3. NWP, Earth-system modeling, and data-assimilation expertise Describe the qualifications and directly relevant experience of the personnel and organizational resources that would support atmospheric modeling, atmospheric physics and dynamics, physics parameterization development, cloud processes, land-surface or coupled Earth-system modeling, and data assimilation under this requirement.

Identify proposed technical leads and provide concise qualification summaries demonstrating prior responsibility for comparable research, software development, model implementation, or operational-transition efforts. Indicate whether personnel are current employees, subcontractor personnel, or contingent hires.

4. Verification, validation, and diagnostics capability Describe your organization’s demonstrated experience developing, sustaining, or applying objective verification, validation, and diagnostic tools for atmospheric or environmental prediction models.

Address experience developing forecast-skill metrics; evaluating clouds, convection, aviation hazards, stratospheric conditions, aerosols/dust, Arctic conditions, or other mission-relevant phenomena; coordinating V&V across modeling teams; and integrating V&V capabilities with NWP and data-assimilation systems.

5. Space-based and advanced observational-data capability Describe your organization’s demonstrated experience ingesting, evaluating, processing, or assimilating space-based, commercial, experimental, or next-generation environmental observations into atmospheric modeling or data-assimilation systems.

Address relevant experience with satellite radiances, observation operators, radiative-transfer modeling, data-quality control, all-sky or all-surface assimilation, new sensor/data-type standards, and observation-impact assessment.

6. Software assurance, cybersecurity, and test practices Describe your organization’s demonstrated software-engineering, configuration-management, cybersecurity, and software-assurance practices applicable to scientific software supporting Government or comparably controlled environments.

Address secure coding; code review; automated build, test, and continuous-integration processes; vulnerability and patch management; Software Bill of Materials development; third-party software/supply-chain risk management; logging and monitoring; incident response; and remediation tracking. Explain how these practices would support execution in DoW cloud and high-performance computing environments.

7. External contributions, integration, and avoidance of code divergence Describe your organization’s process for evaluating, adjudicating, testing, documenting, and integrating software contributions from external parties or open-source communities into an authoritative code baseline.

Explain how your organization would maintain configuration control, coordinate changes across MPAS, MET/METplus, and JEDI, prevent incompatible code forks or branches, preserve interoperability with partner organizations, and protect AFW-specific capabilities while allowing generic, non-sensitive improvements to be incorporated into the community baseline.

8. Unified Software-System Stewardship Describe your organization’s current, demonstrated, and independently established ability to provide coordinated stewardship, governance, release management, configuration management, scientific planning, and software integration for MPAS, MET/METplus, and JEDI.

The response shall identify the organization’s present role and authority, if any, in maintaining or releasing the applicable code baselines; the currently available personnel, repositories, infrastructure, agreements, and technical resources supporting that role; and evidence that the organization can ensure coordinated, compatible development and releases across all three systems without relying on a future transfer of incumbent responsibilities or resources.

9. Existing Organizational Relationships and Dependencies Identify any current subcontracting, teaming, affiliation, licensing, governance, repository-access, personnel, or technical dependencies on UCAR, NCAR, the Developmental Testbed Center, the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation, or other organizations that would be necessary to perform the requirement.

Describe the current status of each relationship or dependency and explain whether the organization can independently perform the full requirement if that relationship, access, or support is unavailable.