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 weather model


Forecasting the Future with Yesterday's Climate: Temperature Bias in AI Weather and Climate Models

Landsberg, Jacob B., Barnes, Elizabeth A.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI-based climate and weather models have rapidly gained popularity, providing faster forecasts with skill that can match or even surpass that of traditional dynamical models. Despite this success, these models face a key challenge: predicting future climates while being trained only with historical data. In this study, we investigate this issue by analyzing boreal winter land temperature biases in AI weather and climate models. We examine two weather models, FourCastNet V2 Small (FourCastNet) and Pangu Weather (Pangu), evaluating their predictions for 2020-2025 and Ai2 Climate Emulator version 2 (ACE2) for 1996-2010. These time periods lie outside of the respective models' training sets and are significantly more recent than the bulk of their training data, allowing us to assess how well the models generalize to new, i.e. more modern, conditions. We find that all three models produce cold-biased mean temperatures, resembling climates from 15-20 years earlier than the period they are predicting. In some regions, like the Eastern U.S., the predictions resemble climates from as much as 20-30 years earlier. Further analysis shows that FourCastNet's and Pangu's cold bias is strongest in the hottest predicted temperatures, indicating limited training exposure to modern extreme heat events. In contrast, ACE2's bias is more evenly distributed but largest in regions, seasons, and parts of the temperature distribution where climate change has been most pronounced. These findings underscore the challenge of training AI models exclusively on historical data and highlight the need to account for such biases when applying them to future climate prediction.


How Google's DeepMind tool is 'more quickly' forecasting hurricane behavior

The Guardian

How Google's DeepMind tool is'more quickly' forecasting hurricane behavior'Less expensive and time consuming' model helps with fast and accurate predictions, possibly saving lives and property When then Tropical Storm Melissa was churning south of Haiti, Philippe Papin, a National Hurricane Center (NHC) meteorologist, had confidence it was about to grow into a monster hurricane. As the lead forecaster on duty, he predicted that in just 24 hours the storm would become a category 4 hurricane and begin a turn towards the coast of Jamaica. No NHC forecaster had ever issued such a bold forecast for rapid strengthening. But Papin had an ace up his sleeve: artificial intelligence in the form of Google's new DeepMind hurricane model - released for the first time in June. And, as predicted, Melissa did become a storm of astonishing strength that tore through Jamaica.


There are actually 9 types of precipitation

Popular Science

Amazon Prime Day is live. See the best deals HERE. Weather models still struggle to parse the millions of datapoints involved in precipitation prediction. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most of us generally think of precipitation in terms of three varieties: rain, snow, and sleet .


MoWE : A Mixture of Weather Experts

Chakraborty, Dibyajyoti, Maulik, Romit, Harrington, Peter, Foster, Dallas, Nabian, Mohammad Amin, Choudhry, Sanjay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data-driven weather models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance, yet progress has plateaued in recent years. This paper introduces a Mixture of Experts (MoWE) approach as a novel paradigm to overcome these limitations, not by creating a new forecaster, but by optimally combining the outputs of existing models. The MoWE model is trained with significantly lower computational resources than the individual experts. Our model employs a Vision Transformer-based gating network that dynamically learns to weight the contributions of multiple "expert" models at each grid point, conditioned on forecast lead time. This approach creates a synthesized deterministic forecast that is more accurate than any individual component in terms of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, achieving up to a 10% lower RMSE than the best-performing AI weather model on a 2-day forecast horizon, significantly outperforming individual experts as well as a simple average across experts. This work presents a computationally efficient and scalable strategy to push the state of the art in data-driven weather prediction by making the most out of leading high-quality forecast models.


FourCastNet 3: A geometric approach to probabilistic machine-learning weather forecasting at scale

Bonev, Boris, Kurth, Thorsten, Mahesh, Ankur, Bisson, Mauro, Kossaifi, Jean, Kashinath, Karthik, Anandkumar, Anima, Collins, William D., Pritchard, Michael S., Keller, Alexander

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

FourCastNet 3 advances global weather modeling by implementing a scalable, geometric machine learning (ML) approach to probabilistic ensemble forecasting. The approach is designed to respect spherical geometry and to accurately model the spatially correlated probabilistic nature of the problem, resulting in stable spectra and realistic dynamics across multiple scales. FourCastNet 3 delivers forecasting accuracy that surpasses leading conventional ensemble models and rivals the best diffusion-based methods, while producing forecasts 8 to 60 times faster than these approaches. In contrast to other ML approaches, FourCastNet 3 demonstrates excellent probabilistic calibration and retains realistic spectra, even at extended lead times of up to 60 days. All of these advances are realized using a purely convolutional neural network architecture tailored for spherical geometry. Scalable and efficient large-scale training on 1024 GPUs and more is enabled by a novel training paradigm for combined model- and data-parallelism, inspired by domain decomposition methods in classical numerical models. Additionally, FourCastNet 3 enables rapid inference on a single GPU, producing a 60-day global forecast at 0.25°, 6-hourly resolution in under 4 minutes. Its computational efficiency, medium-range probabilistic skill, spectral fidelity, and rollout stability at subseasonal timescales make it a strong candidate for improving meteorological forecasting and early warning systems through large ensemble predictions.


EPT-2 Technical Report

Molinaro, Roberto, Siegenheim, Niall, Poulsen, Niels, Daubinet, Jordan Dane, Martin, Henry, Frey, Mark, Thiart, Kevin, Dautel, Alexander Jakob, Schlueter, Andreas, Grigoryev, Alex, Danciu, Bogdan, Ekhtiari, Nikoo, Steunebrink, Bas, Wagner, Leonie, Gabler, Marvin Vincent

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

EPT -2 delivers substantial improvements over its predecessor, EPT -1.5, and sets a new state of the art in predicting energy-relevant variables-including 10m and 100m wind speed, 2m temperature, and surface solar radiation-across the full 0-240h forecast horizon. It consistently outperforms leading AI weather models such as Microsoft Aurora, as well as the operational numerical forecast system IFS HRES from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In parallel, we introduce a perturbation-based ensemble model of EPT -2 for probabilistic forecasting, called EPT -2e. Remarkably, EPT -2e significantly surpasses the ECMWF ENS mean-long considered the gold standard for medium-to long-range forecasting-while operating at a fraction of the computational cost. EPT models, as well as third-party forecasts, are accessible via the app.jua.ai


Anima Anandkumar Highlights AI's Potential to Solve 'Hard Scientific Challenges'

TIME - Tech

Anima Anandkumar is using AI to help solve the world's challenges faster. She has used the technology to speed up prediction models in an effort to get ahead of extreme weather, and to work on sustainable nuclear fusion simulations so as to one day safely harness the energy source. Accepting a TIME100 AI Impact Award in Dubai on Monday, Anandkumar--a professor at California Institute of Technology who was previously the senior director of AI research at Nvidia--credited her engineer parents with setting an example for her. "Having a mom who is an engineer was just such a great role model right at home." Her parents, who brought computerized manufacturing to her hometown in India, opened up her world, she said.


ArchesWeather & ArchesWeatherGen: a deterministic and generative model for efficient ML weather forecasting

Couairon, Guillaume, Singh, Renu, Charantonis, Anastase, Lessig, Christian, Monteleoni, Claire

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Weather forecasting plays a vital role in today's society, from agriculture and logistics to predicting the output of renewable energies, and preparing for extreme weather events. Deep learning weather forecasting models trained with the next state prediction objective on ERA5 have shown great success compared to numerical global circulation models. However, for a wide range of applications, being able to provide representative samples from the distribution of possible future weather states is critical. In this paper, we propose a methodology to leverage deterministic weather models in the design of probabilistic weather models, leading to improved performance and reduced computing costs. We first introduce \textbf{ArchesWeather}, a transformer-based deterministic model that improves upon Pangu-Weather by removing overrestrictive inductive priors. We then design a probabilistic weather model called \textbf{ArchesWeatherGen} based on flow matching, a modern variant of diffusion models, that is trained to project ArchesWeather's predictions to the distribution of ERA5 weather states. ArchesWeatherGen is a true stochastic emulator of ERA5 and surpasses IFS ENS and NeuralGCM on all WeatherBench headline variables (except for NeuralGCM's geopotential). Our work also aims to democratize the use of deterministic and generative machine learning models in weather forecasting research, with academic computing resources. All models are trained at 1.5{\deg} resolution, with a training budget of $\sim$9 V100 days for ArchesWeather and $\sim$45 V100 days for ArchesWeatherGen. For inference, ArchesWeatherGen generates 15-day weather trajectories at a rate of 1 minute per ensemble member on a A100 GPU card. To make our work fully reproducible, our code and models are open source, including the complete pipeline for data preparation, training, and evaluation, at https://github.com/INRIA/geoarches .


Multi-modal graph neural networks for localized off-grid weather forecasting

Yang, Qidong, Giezendanner, Jonathan, Civitarese, Daniel Salles, Jakubik, Johannes, Schmitt, Eric, Chandra, Anirban, Vila, Jeremy, Hohl, Detlef, Hill, Chris, Watson, Campbell, Wang, Sherrie

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Urgent applications like wildfire management and renewable energy generation require precise, localized weather forecasts near the Earth's surface. However, weather forecast products from machine learning or numerical weather models are currently generated on a global regular grid, on which a naive interpolation cannot accurately reflect fine-grained weather patterns close to the ground. In this work, we train a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) end-to-end to downscale gridded forecasts to off-grid locations of interest. This multi-modal GNN takes advantage of local historical weather observations (e.g., wind, temperature) to correct the gridded weather forecast at different lead times towards locally accurate forecasts. Each data modality is modeled as a different type of node in the graph. Using message passing, the node at the prediction location aggregates information from its heterogeneous neighbor nodes. Experiments using weather stations across the Northeastern United States show that our model outperforms a range of data-driven and non-data-driven off-grid forecasting methods. Our approach demonstrates how the gap between global large-scale weather models and locally accurate predictions can be bridged to inform localized decision-making.


Data-driven Surface Solar Irradiance Estimation using Neural Operators at Global Scale

Carpentieri, Alberto, Leinonen, Jussi, Adie, Jeff, Bonev, Boris, Folini, Doris, Hariri, Farah

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate surface solar irradiance (SSI) forecasting is essential for optimizing renewable energy systems, particularly in the context of long-term energy planning on a global scale. This paper presents a pioneering approach to solar radiation forecasting that leverages recent advancements in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and data-driven machine learning weather models. These advances facilitate long, stable rollouts and enable large ensemble forecasts, enhancing the reliability of predictions. Our flexible model utilizes variables forecast by these NWP and AI weather models to estimate 6-hourly SSI at global scale. Developed using NVIDIA Modulus, our model represents the first adaptive global framework capable of providing long-term SSI forecasts. Furthermore, it can be fine-tuned using satellite data, which significantly enhances its performance in the fine-tuned regions, while maintaining accuracy elsewhere. The improved accuracy of these forecasts has substantial implications for the integration of solar energy into power grids, enabling more efficient energy management and contributing to the global transition to renewable energy sources. Figure 1: 6-hourly averaged SSI forecasts over a 48-hour period.