Papers › A Benchmark for AI-based Weather Data Assimilation
A Benchmark for AI-based Weather Data Assimilation
Wuxin Wang, Weicheng Ni, Tao Han, Taikang Yuan, Xiaoyong Li, Lei Bai, Boheng Duan, Kaijun Ren
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led to the development of several Large Weather Models (LWMs) that rival State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems. Until now, these models have still relied on traditional NWP-generated analysis fields as input and are far from autonomous. Currently, scientists are increasingly focusing on developing data-driven data assimilation (DA) models for LWMs. To expedite advancements in this field and facilitate the operationalization of data-driven end-to-end weather forecasting systems, we propose DABench, a benchmark constructed by simulated observations, real-world observations, and ERA5 reanalysis. DABench contributes four standard features: (1) sparse and noisy observations provided for both simulated and real-world experiments; (2) a Skillful pre-trained Transformer-based weather prediction model, Sformer, designed to generate background fields while rigorously assessing the impact of assimilation outcomes on predictions; (3) standardized evaluation metrics for the model comparison; (4) a strong DA baseline, 4DVarFormerV2. Our experimental results demonstrate that the end-to-end weather forecasting system, integrating 4DVarFormerV2 and Sformer, can assimilate real-world observations, thereby facilitating a stable DA cycle lasting one year and achieving a skillful forecasting lead time of up to 7 days. The proposed DABench will significantly advance research in AI-based DA, AI-based weather forecasting, and related domains.
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