Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning
By Ilan Price, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Ferran Alet, Tom R. Andersson, A. El-Kadi, Dominic Masters, Timo Ewalds, Jacklynn Stott, Shakir Mohamed, Peter W. Battaglia and 2 more. Nature, 2024
632 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Weather forecasts are fundamentally uncertain, so predicting the range of probable weather scenarios is crucial for important decisions, from warning the public about hazardous weather to planning renewable energy use. Traditionally, weather forecasts have been based on numerical weather prediction (NWP)1, which relies on physics-based simulations of the atmosphere. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based weather prediction (MLWP) have produced ML-based models with less forecast error than single NWP simulations2,3. However, these advances have focused primarily on single, deterministic forecasts that fail to represent uncertainty and estimate risk. Overall, MLWP has remained less accurate and reliable than state-of-the-art NWP ensemble forecasts. Here we introduce GenCast, a probabilistic weather model with greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world, ENS, the ensemble forecast of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts4. GenCast is an ML weather prediction method, trained on decades of reanalysis data. GenCast generates an ensemble of stochastic 15-day global forecasts, at 12-h steps and 0.25° latitude–longitude resolution, for more than 80 surface and atmospheric variables, in 8 min. It has greater skill than ENS on 97.2% of 1,320 targets we evaluated and better predicts extreme weather, tropical cyclone tracks and wind power production. This work helps open the next chapter in operational weather forecasting, in which crucial weather-dependent decisions are made more accurately and efficiently. GenCast, a probabilistic weather model using artificial intelligence for weather forecasting, has greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world and provides probabilistic, rather than deterministic, forecasts.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/533d77c2dd250e18da88b269cbb221c4835f1365
Citations in the corpus
- The operational medium-range deterministic weather forecasting can be extended beyond a 10-day lead time (2023, neutral): “However, this does not imply that it is superior to constructing diffusion models based on past atmospheric states 39 ; rather, it represents an alternative approach to achieving ensemble forecasting.”