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End-to-end deep learning methods beat production weather forecast accuracy (arxiv.org)
3 points by johmathe on Dec 29, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A computer model learns patterns from decades of past weather records and rolls them forward to predict hundreds of weather variables worldwide, up to 10 days ahead, in under a minute. It beat the best traditional forecast system on 90% of 1,380 accuracy checks.

Abstract · GraphCast: Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting

Global medium-range weather forecasting is critical to decision-making across many social and economic domains. Traditional numerical weather prediction uses increased compute resources to improve forecast accuracy, but cannot directly use historical weather data to improve the underlying model. We introduce a machine learning-based method called "GraphCast", which can be trained directly from reanalysis data. It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25 degree resolution globally, in under one minute. We show that GraphCast significantly outperforms the most accurate operational deterministic systems on 90% of 1380 verification targets, and its forecasts support better severe event prediction, including tropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers, and extreme temperatures. GraphCast is a key advance in accurate and efficient weather forecasting, and helps realize the promise of machine learning for modeling complex dynamical systems.

Remi Lam, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Matthew Willson, Peter Wirnsberger, Meire Fortunato, Ferran Alet, Suman Ravuri, Timo Ewalds, Zach Eaton-Rosen, Weihua Hu, Alexander Merose, Stephan Hoyer, et al.
arXiv:2212.12794 · cs.LG, physics.ao-ph · submitted Dec 24, 2022 · updated Aug 4, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · GraphCast code and trained weights are available at: https://github.com/deepmind/graphcast

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Also discussed: Jan 2023 (1 point, 0 comments)

This is strange to me because my understanding is that era5 is reanalysis data based on models and data assimilation (i.e. bayesian time series modeling). So they produced a machine learning model that predicted modeled data but not the raw data. But I could be completely wrong as Im not an expert on this.

link for era5 https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datas...