WeatherReal: A Benchmark Based on In-Situ Observations for Evaluating Weather Models

In recent years, AI-based weather forecasting models have matched or even outperformed numerical weather prediction systems. However, most of these models have been trained and evaluated on reanalysis datasets like ERA5. These datasets, being products of numerical models, often diverge substantially from actual observations in some crucial variables like near-surface temperature, wind, precipitation and clouds - parameters that hold significant public interest. To address this divergence, we introduce WeatherReal, a novel benchmark dataset for weather forecasting, derived from global near-surface in-situ observations. WeatherReal also features a publicly accessible quality control and evaluation framework. This paper details the sources and processing methodologies underlying the dataset, and further illustrates the advantage of in-situ observations in capturing hyper-local and extreme weather through comparative analyses and case studies. Using WeatherReal, we evaluated several data-driven models and compared them with leading numerical models. Our work aims to advance the AI-based weather forecasting research towards a more application-focused and operation-ready approach.

Aurora: A Foundation Model of the Atmosphere

Deep learning foundation models are revolutionizing many facets of science by leveraging vast amounts of data to learn general-purpose representations that can be adapted to tackle diverse downstream tasks. Foundation models hold the promise to also transform our ability to model our planet and its subsystems by exploiting the vast expanse of Earth system data. Here we introduce Aurora, a large-scale foundation model of the atmosphere trained on over a million hours of diverse weather and climate data. Aurora leverages the strengths of the foundation modelling approach to produce operational forecasts for a wide variety of atmospheric prediction problems, including those with limited training data, heterogeneous variables, and extreme events. In under a minute, Aurora produces 5-day global air pollution predictions and 10-day high-resolution weather forecasts that outperform state-of-the-art classical simulation tools and the best specialized deep learning models. Taken together, these results indicate that foundation models can transform environmental forecasting.

DeepSpeed4Science Initiative: Enabling Large-Scale Scientific Discovery through Sophisticated AI System Technologies

In the upcoming decade, deep learning may revolutionize the natural sciences, enhancing our capacity to model and predict natural occurrences. This could herald a new era of scientific exploration, bringing significant advancements across sectors from drug development to renewable energy. To answer this call, we present DeepSpeed4Science initiative (deepspeed4science.ai) which aims to build unique capabilities through AI system technology innovations to help domain experts to unlock today's biggest science mysteries. By leveraging DeepSpeed's current technology pillars (training, inference and compression) as base technology enablers, DeepSpeed4Science will create a new set of AI system technologies tailored for accelerating scientific discoveries by addressing their unique complexity beyond the common technical approaches used for accelerating generic large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we showcase the early progress we made with DeepSpeed4Science in addressing two of the critical system challenges in structural biology research.

Super-resolution Probabilistic Rain Prediction from Satellite Data Using 3D U-Nets and EarthFormers

Accurate and timely rain prediction is crucial for decision making and is also a challenging task. This paper presents a solution which won the 2 nd prize in the Weather4cast 2022 NeurIPS competition using 3D U-Nets and EarthFormers for 8-hour probabilistic rain prediction based on multi-band satellite images. The spatial context effect of the input satellite image has been deeply explored and optimal context range has been found. Based on the imbalanced rain distribution, we trained multiple models with different loss functions. To further improve the model performance, multi-model ensemble and threshold optimization were used to produce the final probabilistic rain prediction. Experiment results and leaderboard scores demonstrate that optimal spatial context, combined loss function, multi-model ensemble, and threshold optimization all provide modest model gain. A permutation test was used to analyze the effect of each satellite band on rain prediction, and results show that satellite bands signifying cloudtop phase (8.7 um) and cloud-top height (10.8 and 13.4 um) are the best predictors for rain prediction. The source code is available at https://github.com/bugsuse/weather4cast-2022-stage2.

MS-nowcasting: Operational Precipitation Nowcasting with Convolutional LSTMs at Microsoft Weather

We present the encoder-forecaster convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) deep-learning model that powers Microsoft Weather's operational precipitation nowcasting product. This model takes as input a sequence of weather radar mosaics and deterministically predicts future radar reflectivity at lead times up to 6 hours. By stacking a large input receptive field along the feature dimension and conditioning the model's forecaster with predictions from the physics-based High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model, we are able to outperform optical flow and HRRR baselines by 20-25% on multiple metrics averaged over all lead times.