Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting.
Remi Lam, Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Matthew Willson, Peter Wirnsberger, Meire Fortunato, Ferran Alet, Suman Ravuri, Timo Ewalds, Zach Eaton-Rosen, Weihua Hu, Alexander Merose, Stephan Hoyer, George Holland, Oriol Vinyals, Jacklynn Stott, Alexander Pritzel, Shakir Mohamed, Peter Battaglia
Global medium-range weather forecasting is critical to decision-making across many social and economic domains. Traditional numerical weather prediction uses increased compute resources to improve forecast accuracy, but does not directly use historical weather data to improve the underlying model. Here, we introduce "GraphCast," a machine learning-based method trained directly from reanalysis data. It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25° resolution globally, in under one minute. GraphCast significantly outperforms the most accurate operational deterministic systems on 90% of 1380 verification targets, and its forecasts support better severe event prediction, including tropical cyclones tracking, atmospheric rivers, and extreme temperatures. GraphCast is a key advance in accurate and efficient weather forecasting, and helps realize the promise of machine learning for modeling complex dynamical systems.
