TianQuan-S2S: A Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Global Weather Model via Incorporate Climatology State
This addresses a critical need for accurate S2S forecasts in agriculture, energy, and emergency management, representing a strong specific gain rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the challenging problem of Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) weather forecasting by proposing TianQuan-S2S, a global model that integrates initial weather states with climatological means, resulting in significant improvements over climatology mean, traditional numerical methods, and data-driven models, including outperforming ECMWF-S2S and Fuxi-S2S in key variables.
Accurate Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) forecasting is vital for decision-making in agriculture, energy production, and emergency management. However, it remains a challenging and underexplored problem due to the chaotic nature of the weather system. Recent data-driven studies have shown promising results, but their performance is limited by the inadequate incorporation of climate states and a model tendency to degrade, progressively losing fine-scale details and yielding over-smoothed forecasts. To overcome these limitations, we propose TianQuan-S2S, a global S2S forecasting model that integrates initial weather states with climatological means via incorporating climatology into patch embedding and enhancing variability capture through an uncertainty-augmented Transformer. Extensive experiments on the Earth Reanalysis 5 (ERA5) reanalysis dataset demonstrate that our model yields a significant improvement in both deterministic and ensemble forecasting over the climatology mean, traditional numerical methods, and data-driven models. Ablation studies empirically show the effectiveness of our model designs. Remarkably, our model outperforms skillful numerical ECMWF-S2S and advanced data-driven Fuxi-S2S in key meteorological variables.