Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Lei, Su, Xinyu, Zhong, Xiaohui, Li, Hao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10297
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910208144441344
author Chen, Lei
Su, Xinyu
Zhong, Xiaohui
Li, Hao
author_facet Chen, Lei
Su, Xinyu
Zhong, Xiaohui
Li, Hao
contents Subseasonal precipitation forecasting is inherently uncertain due to chaotic atmospheric dynamics, making reliable uncertainty estimation essential for real-world applications. Existing approaches typically represent uncertainty through ensemble forecasts rather than directly modeling predictive distributions. However, due to systematic model biases, raw ensemble outputs are often not well calibrated and cannot be directly interpreted as reliable uncertainty estimates. As a result, operational systems rely on post-hoc calibration based on reforecast datasets, which are computationally expensive to generate and maintain. To address these limitations, we propose QuantWeather, an end-to-end probabilistic forecasting framework with a dual-head design. The probabilistic and deterministic heads are supervised with separate objectives and optimized jointly. The framework further supports stochastic sampling, enabling probabilistic outputs even with a single stochastic forward pass and allowing optional multi-sample aggregation. Extensive experiments show that QuantWeather demonstrates superior probabilistic forecasting skill while substantially reducing inference-time computational and storage costs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10297
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QuantWeather: Quantile-Aware Probabilistic Forecasting for Subseasonal Precipitation
Chen, Lei
Su, Xinyu
Zhong, Xiaohui
Li, Hao
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Subseasonal precipitation forecasting is inherently uncertain due to chaotic atmospheric dynamics, making reliable uncertainty estimation essential for real-world applications. Existing approaches typically represent uncertainty through ensemble forecasts rather than directly modeling predictive distributions. However, due to systematic model biases, raw ensemble outputs are often not well calibrated and cannot be directly interpreted as reliable uncertainty estimates. As a result, operational systems rely on post-hoc calibration based on reforecast datasets, which are computationally expensive to generate and maintain. To address these limitations, we propose QuantWeather, an end-to-end probabilistic forecasting framework with a dual-head design. The probabilistic and deterministic heads are supervised with separate objectives and optimized jointly. The framework further supports stochastic sampling, enabling probabilistic outputs even with a single stochastic forward pass and allowing optional multi-sample aggregation. Extensive experiments show that QuantWeather demonstrates superior probabilistic forecasting skill while substantially reducing inference-time computational and storage costs.
title QuantWeather: Quantile-Aware Probabilistic Forecasting for Subseasonal Precipitation
topic Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10297