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The Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), previously known as the GFS Global ENSemble (GENS), is a weather forecast model made up of 21 separate forecasts, or ensemble members. The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) started the GEFS to address the nature of uncertainty in weather observations, which is used to initialize weather forecast models. The GEFS attempts to quantify the amount of uncertainty in a forecast by generating an ensemble of multiple forecasts, each minutely different, or perturbed, from the original observations. With global coverage, GEFS is produced four times a day with weather forecasts going out to 16 days.