Pushing the Limits of High-Resolution Weather Forecasting through Data Scaling

arXiv:2608.14652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of 0.1$^{\circ}$ global weather forecasting models based on machine learning (ML) is constrained by the limited availability of high-resolution data, as decades of reanalysis are only available at 0.25$^{\circ}$ resolution. While existing approaches fine-tune 0.25$^{\circ}$ forecast models on limited 0.1$^{\circ}$ samples, we show that this transfer is hindered by the irreversible information loss inherent in coarse-resolution forecasting. Therefore, we propose BaguanHR, a framework that shifts the focus from transferring models to transferring data. We first show that super-resolution (SR) has lower conditional entropy and input amplification than forecasting, making it a more robust vehicle for resolution transfer. By leveraging this advantage through variable-wise SR, we synthesize extensive 0.1$^{\circ}$ data from ERA5. BaguanHR's performance on the synthetic-plus-real dataset exceeds both ML-based methods and IFS-HRES, achieving superior performance across over 85% of the lead times within 72 hours. Furthermore, our findings highlight a power-law scaling effect, as a twofold increase in data reduces RMSE by 4.6% for 72-hour forecasting and 4.9% for 120-hour forecasting. Our results demonstrate that scaling high resolution ML-based forecasting is primarily a data bottleneck, and that variable-wise super-resolution provides a simple yet general solution to unlock long coarse-resolution reanalyses for high-resolution training.

Abstract:The development of 0.1$^{\circ}$ global weather forecasting models based on machine learning (ML) is constrained by the limited availability of high-resolution data, as decades of reanalysis are only available at 0.25$^{\circ}$ resolution. While existing approaches fine-tune 0.25$^{\circ}$ forecast models on limited 0.1$^{\circ}$ samples, we show that this transfer is hindered by the irreversible information loss inherent in coarse-resolution forecasting. Therefore, we propose BaguanHR, a framework that shifts the focus from transferring models to transferring data. We first show that super-resolution (SR) has lower conditional entropy and input amplification than forecasting, making it a more robust vehicle for resolution transfer. By leveraging this advantage through variable-wise SR, we synthesize extensive 0.1$^{\circ}$ data from ERA5. BaguanHR's performance on the synthetic-plus-real dataset exceeds both ML-based methods and IFS-HRES, achieving superior performance across over 85% of the lead times within 72 hours. Furthermore, our findings highlight a power-law scaling effect, as a twofold increase in data reduces RMSE by 4.6% for 72-hour forecasting and 4.9% for 120-hour forecasting. Our results demonstrate that scaling high resolution ML-based forecasting is primarily a data bottleneck, and that variable-wise super-resolution provides a simple yet general solution to unlock long coarse-resolution reanalyses for high-resolution training.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2608.14652 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.14652v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14652 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Pushing the Limits of High-Resolution Weather Forecasting through Data Scaling

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