2021/09/29 by Sijie He, Xinyan Li, He, Sijie +10 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Climate variability and models #Cryospheric studies and observations #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations #cs.LG #physics.ao-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.05196
arxiv created 2021/09/29 · openalex publication_date 2021/09/29 · arxiv updated 2021/10/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Sub-seasonal climate 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 be conservatives in their forecasts 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, dynamical model predictions, and code for the ML models are released along with the paper for the benefit of the broader machine learning community.