Artificial intelligence in weather and climate prediction : Learning atmospheric dynamics

Abstract: Weather and climate prediction is dominated by high dimensionality, interactions on many different spatial and temporal scales and chaotic dynamics. This makes many problems in the field quite complex ones, and also state-of-the-art numerical models are - despite their immense computational costs - not sufficient for many applications. Therefore, it is appealing to use emerging new technologies such as artificial intelligence to tackle these problems.We show that it is possible to use deep neural networks to emulate the full dynamics of a strongly simplified general circulation model, providing both good forecasts of the model state several days ahead as well as stable long-term climate timeseries. This method partly also works on more complex and realistic models, but only for forecasting the model's weather several days ahead, not for creating climate runs. It is sufficient to use 50-100 years of data for training the networks. The same neural network method can be combined with singular value decomposition from numerical ensemble weather forecasting in order to generate probabilistic ensemble forecasts with the neural networks.On a more fundamental level, we show that in a simple dynamical systems setting there seem to be limitations in the ability of feed-forward neural networks to generalize to new regions of the system. This is caused by different parts of the network learning to model different parts of the system. Contradictory, for another simple dynamical system this is shown not to be an issue, raising doubts on the usefulness of results from simple models in the context of more complex ones. Additionally, we show that neural networks are to some extent able to “learn” the influence of slowly changing external forcings on the dynamics of the system, but only given broad enough forcing regimes.Finally, we present a method to complement operational weather forecasts. Given the initial fields and the error of past weather forecasts, a neural network is used to predict the uncertainty in new forecasts, given only the initial field of the new forecast.