Piet Termonia

Aaron Van Poecke, Tobias Sebastian Finn, Ruoke Meng et al.

Current postprocessing techniques often require separate models for each lead time and disregard possible inter-ensemble relationships by either correcting each member separately or by employing distributional approaches. In this work, we tackle these shortcomings with an innovative, fast and accurate Transformer which postprocesses each ensemble member individually while allowing information exchange across variables, spatial dimensions and lead times by means of multi-headed self-attention. Weather forecasts are postprocessed over 20 lead times simultaneously while including up to fifteen meteorological predictors. We use the EUPPBench dataset for training which contains ensemble predictions from the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts' integrated forecasting system alongside corresponding observations. The work presented here is the first to postprocess the ten and one hundred-meter wind speed forecasts within this benchmark dataset, while also correcting two-meter temperature. Our approach significantly improves the original forecasts, as measured by the CRPS, with 16.5\% for two-meter temperature, 10\% for ten-meter wind speed and 9\% for one hundred-meter wind speed, outperforming a classical member-by-member approach employed as a competitive benchmark. Furthermore, being up to six times faster, it fulfills the demand for rapid operational weather forecasts in various downstream applications, including renewable energy forecasting.

Jasper S. Wijnands, Michiel Van Ginderachter, Bastien François et al.

Regional machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models based on graph neural networks have recently demonstrated remarkable predictive accuracy, outperforming numerical weather prediction models at lower computational costs. In particular, limited-area model (LAM) and stretched-grid model (SGM) approaches have emerged for generating high-resolution regional forecasts, based on initial conditions from a regional (re)analysis. While LAM uses lateral boundaries from an external global model, SGM incorporates a global domain at lower resolution. This study aims to understand how the differences in model design impact relative performance and potential applications. Specifically, the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches are identified for generating deterministic regional forecasts over Europe. Using the Anemoi framework, models of both types are built by minimally adapting a shared architecture and trained using global and regional reanalyses in a near-identical setup. Several inference experiments have been conducted to explore their relative performance and highlight key differences. Results show that both LAM and SGM are competitive deterministic MLWP models with generally accurate and comparable forecasting performance over the regional domain. Various differences were identified in the performance of the models across applications. LAM is able to successfully exploit high-quality boundary forcings to make predictions within the regional domain and is suitable in contexts where global data is difficult to acquire. SGM is fully self-contained for easier operationalisation, can take advantage of more training data and significantly surpasses LAM in terms of (temporal) generalisability. Our paper can serve as a starting point for meteorological institutes to guide their choice between LAM and SGM in developing an operational data-driven forecasting system.