mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

WeatherBench: A benchmark dataset for data-driven weather forecasting

arXiv 2002.00469 ↗First posted 2 Feb 2020physics.ao-ph stat.MLcited by 272

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Abstract (arXiv)

Data-driven approaches, most prominently deep learning, have become powerful tools for prediction in many domains. A natural question to ask is whether data-driven methods could also be used to predict global weather patterns days in advance. First studies show promise but the lack of a common dataset and evaluation metrics make inter-comparison between studies difficult. Here we present a benchmark dataset for data-driven medium-range weather forecasting, a topic of high scientific interest for atmospheric and computer scientists alike. We provide data derived from the ERA5 archive that has been processed to facilitate the use in machine learning models. We propose simple and clear evaluation metrics which will enable a direct comparison between different methods. Further, we provide baseline scores from simple linear regression techniques, deep learning models, as well as purely physical forecasting models. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/pangeo-data/WeatherBench and the companion code is reproducible with tutorials for getting started. We hope that this dataset will accelerate research in data-driven weather forecasting.

Key facts. Cited by 272 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 17; 2022: 30; 2023: 37; 2024: 60; 2025: 80; 2026: 48.

272 papers.

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  1. 2022FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operatorscited by 748
  2. 2023ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climatecited by 325
  3. 2024Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Expertscited by 280
  4. 2022GraphCast: Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecastingcited by 261
  5. 2023FuXi: A cascade machine learning forecasting system for 15-day global weather forecastcited by 237
  6. 2023WeatherBench 2: A benchmark for the next generation of data-driven global weather modelscited by 227
  7. 2023Spherical Fourier Neural Operators: Learning Stable Dynamics on the Spherecited by 225
  8. 2023FengWu: Pushing the Skillful Global Medium-range Weather Forecast beyond 10 Days Leadcited by 170
  9. 2023GenCast: Diffusion-based ensemble forecasting for medium-range weathercited by 169
  10. 2022Forecasting Global Weather with Graph Neural Networkscited by 165
  11. 2022Pangu-Weather: A 3D High-Resolution Model for Fast and Accurate Global Weather Forecastcited by 164
  12. 2025Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecastingcited by 158
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  4. 2023DYffusion: A Dynamics-informed Diffusion Model for Spatiotemporal Forecastingcited by 105
  5. 2024ClimODE: Climate and Weather Forecasting with Physics-informed Neural ODEscited by 78
  6. 2023Machine learning with data assimilation and uncertainty quantification for dynamical systems: a reviewcited by 74
  7. 2023Deep Learning for Day Forecasts from Sparse Observationscited by 70
  8. 2022When Physics Meets Machine Learning: A Survey of Physics-Informed Machine Learningcited by 64
  9. 2021Scientific Machine Learning Benchmarkscited by 60
  10. 2024DiffDA: a Diffusion Model for Weather-scale Data Assimilationcited by 59
  11. 2023OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learningcited by 53
  12. 2025MTBench: A Multimodal Time Series Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning and Question Answeringcited by 50
  13. 2023ClimateLearn: Benchmarking Machine Learning for Weather and Climate Modelingcited by 46
  14. 2025Physics-Constrained Flow Matching: Sampling Generative Models with Hard Constraintscited by 46
  15. 2021Physics-Guided Deep Learning for Dynamical Systems: A Surveycited by 43
  16. 2023CFDBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Machine Learning Methods in Fluid Dynamicscited by 40
  17. 2024ChaosBench: A Multi-Channel, Physics-Based Benchmark for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Predictioncited by 40
  18. 2021Will Artificial Intelligence supersede Earth System and Climate Models?cited by 37
  19. 2021Probabilistic Forecasting with Generative Networks via Scoring Rule Minimizationcited by 35
  20. 2021EarthNet2021: A large-scale dataset and challenge for Earth surface forecasting as a guided video prediction taskcited by 34
  21. 2023SwinRDM: Integrate SwinRNN with Diffusion Model towards High-Resolution and High-Quality Weather Forecastingcited by 32
  22. 2023Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Data Understanding: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 32
  23. 2022SwinVRNN: A Data-Driven Ensemble Forecasting Model via Learned Distribution Perturbationcited by 31
  24. 2022Compressing multidimensional weather and climate data into neural networkscited by 31
  25. 2024On the Foundations of Earth and Climate Foundation Modelscited by 31
  26. 2021Conditional Local Convolution for Spatio-temporal Meteorological Forecastingcited by 30
  27. 2021Variational Data Assimilation with a Learned Inverse Observation Operatorcited by 28
  28. 2022Physically Constrained Generative Adversarial Networks for Improving Precipitation Fields from Earth System Modelscited by 28
  29. 2023W-MAE: Pre-trained weather model with masked autoencoder for multi-variable weather forecastingcited by 28
  30. 2023Physics-Informed Computer Vision: A Review and Perspectivescited by 28
  31. 2024Continuous Ensemble Weather Forecasting with Diffusion modelscited by 27
  32. 2023AI-GOMS: Large AI-Driven Global Ocean Modeling Systemcited by 26
  33. 2023ClimateSet: A Large-Scale Climate Model Dataset for Machine Learningcited by 25
  34. 2024Generalizing Weather Forecast to Fine-grained Temporal Scales via Physics-AI Hybrid Modelingcited by 23
  35. 2023FengWu-4DVar: Coupling the Data-driven Weather Forecasting Model with 4D Variational Assimilationcited by 22
  36. 2024CRA5: Extreme Compression of ERA5 for Portable Global Climate and Weather Research via an Efficient Variational Transformercited by 22
  37. 2021SubseasonalClimateUSA: A Dataset for Subseasonal Forecasting and Benchmarkingcited by 21
  38. 2023Scaling Spherical CNNscited by 21

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