Data-driven global weather predictions at high resolutions. (March 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Taylor, John A; Larraondo, Pablo; de Supinski, Bronis R
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 36:Number 2(2022)
• Page Start: 130
• Page End: 140
• Publication Date: 2022-03
• Subjects: Weather prediction -- data-driven modelling -- deep neural networks -- Unet -- scalable neural networks; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/10943420211039818
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

Society has benefited enormously from the continuous advancement in numerical weather prediction that has occurred over many decades driven by a combination of outstanding scientific, computational and technological breakthroughs. Here, we demonstrate that data-driven methods are now positioned to contribute to the next wave of major advances in atmospheric science. We show that data-driven models can predict important meteorological quantities of interest to society such as global high resolution precipitation fields (0.25°) and can deliver accurate forecasts of the future state of the atmosphere without prior knowledge of the laws of physics and chemistry. We also show how these data-driven methods can be scaled to run on supercomputers with up to 1024 modern graphics processing units and beyond resulting in rapid training of data-driven models, thus supporting a cycle of rapid research and innovation. Taken together, these two results illustrate the significant potential of data-driven methods to advance atmospheric science and operational weather forecasting.