Generative assimilation and prediction for weather and climate
This addresses the challenge of seamless weather and climate modeling for meteorology and climate science, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing machine learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of error accumulation in long-term weather and climate predictions by introducing Generative Assimilation and Prediction (GAP), a unified deep generative framework that integrates data assimilation and prediction, resulting in competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods across tasks like assimilation, forecasting, and stable millennial simulations.
Machine learning models have shown great success in predicting weather up to two weeks ahead, outperforming process-based benchmarks. However, existing approaches mostly focus on the prediction task, and do not incorporate the necessary data assimilation. Moreover, these models suffer from error accumulation in long roll-outs, limiting their applicability to seasonal predictions or climate projections. Here, we introduce Generative Assimilation and Prediction (GAP), a unified deep generative framework for assimilation and prediction of both weather and climate. By learning to quantify the probabilistic distribution of atmospheric states under observational, predictive, and external forcing constraints, GAP excels in a broad range of weather-climate related tasks, including data assimilation, seamless prediction, and climate simulation. In particular, GAP is competitive with state-of-the-art ensemble assimilation, probabilistic weather forecast and seasonal prediction, yields stable millennial simulations, and reproduces climate variability from daily to decadal time scales.