SwinVRNN: A Data-Driven Ensemble Forecasting Model via Learned Distribution Perturbation

Data-driven approaches for medium-range weather forecasting are recently shown extraordinarily promising for ensemble forecasting for their fast inference speed compared to traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, but their forecast accuracy can hardly match the state-of-the-art operational ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) model. Previous data-driven attempts achieve ensemble forecast using some simple perturbation methods, like initial condition perturbation and Monte Carlo dropout. However, they mostly suffer unsatisfactory ensemble performance, which is arguably attributed to the sub-optimal ways of applying perturbation. We propose a Swin Transformer-based Variational Recurrent Neural Network (SwinVRNN), which is a stochastic weather forecasting model combining a SwinRNN predictor with a perturbation module. SwinRNN is designed as a Swin Transformer-based recurrent neural network, which predicts future states deterministically. Furthermore, to model the stochasticity in prediction, we design a perturbation module following the Variational Auto-Encoder paradigm to learn multivariate Gaussian distributions of a time-variant stochastic latent variable from data. Ensemble forecasting can be easily achieved by perturbing the model features leveraging noise sampled from the learned distribution. We also compare four categories of perturbation methods for ensemble forecasting, i.e. fixed distribution perturbation, learned distribution perturbation, MC dropout, and multi model ensemble. Comparisons on WeatherBench dataset show the learned distribution perturbation method using our SwinVRNN model achieves superior forecast accuracy and reasonable ensemble spread due to joint optimization of the two targets. More notably, SwinVRNN surpasses operational IFS on surface variables of 2-m temperature and 6-hourly total precipitation at all lead times up to five days.