Data-driven global weather predictions at high resolutions

John Taylor, Pablo Larraondo, Bronis R. de Supinski

The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications · 18 August 2021

In one sentence. Data-driven global model forecasts atmospheric state and 0.25-degree precipitation without physics, with training scaled to 1024 GPUs for rapid iteration.

Abstract

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 degrees) 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 super-computers with up to 1024 modern graphics processing units (GPU) 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.

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