Papers › Ensemble weather forecast post-processing with a flexible probabilistic neural network approach

Ensemble weather forecast post-processing with a flexible probabilistic neural network approach

29 Mar 2023arXiv:2303.17610archive 2025-07-28

Peter Mlakar, Janko Merše, Jana Faganeli Pucer

Ensemble forecast post-processing is a necessary step in producing accurate probabilistic forecasts. Conventional post-processing methods operate by estimating the parameters of a parametric distribution, frequently on a per-location or per-lead-time basis. We propose a novel, neural network-based method, which produces forecasts for all locations and lead times, jointly. To relax the distributional assumption of many post-processing methods, our approach incorporates normalizing flows as flexible parametric distribution estimators. This enables us to model varying forecast distributions in a mathematically exact way. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the context of the EUPPBench benchmark, where we conduct temperature forecast post-processing for stations in a sub-region of western Europe. We show that our novel method exhibits state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark, outclassing our previous, well-performing entry. Additionally, by providing a detailed comparison of three variants of our novel post-processing method, we elucidate the reasons why our method outperforms per-lead-time-based approaches and approaches with distributional assumptions.

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Normalizing Flows

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