GraphCast: Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting
Abstract
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 cannot directly use historical weather data to improve the underlying model. We introduce a machine learning-based method called "GraphCast", which can be trained directly from reanalysis data. It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25 degree resolution globally, in under one minute. We show that 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, 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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2212.12794,
title = {GraphCast: Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting},
author = {Remi Lam and Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez and Matthew Willson and Peter Wirnsberger and Meire Fortunato and Ferran Alet and Suman Ravuri and Timo Ewalds and Zach Eaton-Rosen and Weihua Hu and Alexander Merose and Stephan Hoyer and George Holland and Oriol Vinyals and Jacklynn Stott and Alexander Pritzel and Shakir Mohamed and Peter Battaglia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.12794},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
GraphCast code and trained weights are available at: https://github.com/deepmind/graphcast