Learning and Dynamical Models for Sub-seasonal Climate Forecasting: Comparison and Collaboration

Authors

  • Sijie He Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Xinyan Li Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  • Laurie Trenary Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Science, George Mason University
  • Benjamin A Cash Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Science, George Mason University
  • Timothy DelSole Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Science, George Mason University
  • Arindam Banerjee Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i4.20372

Keywords:

Domain(s) Of Application (APP), Machine Learning (ML)

Abstract

Sub-seasonal forecasting (SSF) is the prediction of key climate variables such as temperature and precipitation on the 2-week to 2-month time horizon. Skillful SSF would have substantial societal value in areas such as agricultural productivity, hydrology and water resource management, and emergency planning for extreme events such as droughts and wildfires. Despite its societal importance, SSF has stayed a challenging problem compared to both short-term weather forecasting and long-term seasonal forecasting. Recent studies have shown the potential of machine learning (ML) models to advance SSF. In this paper, for the first time, we perform a fine-grained comparison of a suite of modern ML models with start-of-the-art physics-based dynamical models from the Subseasonal Experiment (SubX) project for SSF in the western contiguous United States. Additionally, we explore mechanisms to enhance the ML models by using forecasts from dynamical models. Empirical results illustrate that, on average, ML models outperform dynamical models while the ML models tend to generate forecasts with conservative magnitude compared to the SubX models. Further, we illustrate that ML models make forecasting errors under extreme weather conditions, e.g., cold waves due to the polar vortex, highlighting the need for separate models for extreme events. Finally, we show that suitably incorporating dynamical model forecasts as inputs to ML models can substantially improve the forecasting performance of the ML models. The SSF dataset constructed for the work and code for the ML models are released along with the paper for the benefit of the artificial intelligence community.

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Published

2022-06-28

How to Cite

He, S., Li, X., Trenary, L., Cash, B. A., DelSole, T., & Banerjee, A. (2022). Learning and Dynamical Models for Sub-seasonal Climate Forecasting: Comparison and Collaboration. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36(4), 4495-4503. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i4.20372

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Domain(s) Of Application