Data-driven medium-range weather prediction with a Resnet pretrained on climate simulations: A new model for WeatherBench

Understand

Numerical weather prediction has traditionally been based on physical models of the atmosphere.

• Recently, however, the rise of deep learning has created increased interest in purely data-driven medium-range weather forecasting with first studies exploring the feasibility of such an approach.
• To accelerate progress in this area, the WeatherBench benchmark challenge was defined.
• Here, we train a deep residual convolutional neural network (Resnet) to predict geopotential, temperature and precipitation at 5.625 degree resolution up to 5 days ahead.