A comparison of stretched-grid and limited-area modelling for data-driven regional weather forecasting
This work provides guidance for meteorological institutes on choosing between modeling approaches for operational data-driven weather forecasting, representing an incremental comparison study.
The study compared stretched-grid and limited-area modeling approaches for regional machine learning weather prediction over Europe, finding both to be accurate and competitive, with LAM better for high-quality boundary conditions and SGM offering superior generalizability and easier operationalization.
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.