Efficient Subseasonal Weather Forecast using Teleconnection-informed Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Shan, Xiong, Zhitong, Zhu, Xiao Xiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913222870695936
author Zhao, Shan
Xiong, Zhitong
Zhu, Xiao Xiang
author_facet Zhao, Shan
Xiong, Zhitong
Zhu, Xiao Xiang
contents Subseasonal forecasting, which is pivotal for agriculture, water resource management, and early warning of disasters, faces challenges due to the chaotic nature of the atmosphere. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have revolutionized weather forecasting by achieving competitive predictive skills to numerical models. However, training such foundation models requires thousands of GPU days, which causes substantial carbon emissions and limits their broader applicability. Moreover, ML models tend to fool the pixel-wise error scores by producing smoothed results which lack physical consistency and meteorological meaning. To deal with the aforementioned problems, we propose a teleconnection-informed transformer. Our architecture leverages the pretrained Pangu model to achieve good initial weights and integrates a teleconnection-informed temporal module to improve predictability in an extended temporal range. Remarkably, by adjusting 1.1% of the Pangu model's parameters, our method enhances predictability on four surface and five upper-level atmospheric variables at a two-week lead time. Furthermore, the teleconnection-filtered features improve the spatial granularity of outputs significantly, indicating their potential physical consistency. Our research underscores the importance of atmospheric and oceanic teleconnections in driving future weather conditions. Besides, it presents a resource-efficient pathway for researchers to leverage existing foundation models on versatile downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_17870
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Subseasonal Weather Forecast using Teleconnection-informed Transformers
Zhao, Shan
Xiong, Zhitong
Zhu, Xiao Xiang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Subseasonal forecasting, which is pivotal for agriculture, water resource management, and early warning of disasters, faces challenges due to the chaotic nature of the atmosphere. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have revolutionized weather forecasting by achieving competitive predictive skills to numerical models. However, training such foundation models requires thousands of GPU days, which causes substantial carbon emissions and limits their broader applicability. Moreover, ML models tend to fool the pixel-wise error scores by producing smoothed results which lack physical consistency and meteorological meaning. To deal with the aforementioned problems, we propose a teleconnection-informed transformer. Our architecture leverages the pretrained Pangu model to achieve good initial weights and integrates a teleconnection-informed temporal module to improve predictability in an extended temporal range. Remarkably, by adjusting 1.1% of the Pangu model's parameters, our method enhances predictability on four surface and five upper-level atmospheric variables at a two-week lead time. Furthermore, the teleconnection-filtered features improve the spatial granularity of outputs significantly, indicating their potential physical consistency. Our research underscores the importance of atmospheric and oceanic teleconnections in driving future weather conditions. Besides, it presents a resource-efficient pathway for researchers to leverage existing foundation models on versatile downstream tasks.
title Efficient Subseasonal Weather Forecast using Teleconnection-informed Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17870