Uncertainty-Aware End-to-End AI Weather Forecasting: Disentangling Observation and Model Contributions

원문 초록

End-to-end weather forecasting systems produce skillful global gridded and station forecasts directly from raw Earth observations, replacing the numerical weather prediction pipeline, including data assimilation, at a fraction of its cost. These systems are deterministic and issue no uncertainty. Here we render the Aardvark Weather model probabilistic by attaching one stochastic mechanism to each component: learned, input-dependent noise at the observation encoder, aimed at the uncertainty inherited from the observing system, and Monte Carlo dropout in the processor, aimed at the uncertainty of the learned dynamics. The resulting nested ensemble attributes forecast spread to the two sources through a law-of-total-variance decomposition, cross-checked by withholding observation streams. Probabilistic finetuning significantly improves the mean forecast, by 11% on average across variables and lead times. The ensemble is close to calibrated against ERA5 through the medium range, is at least as accurate as the deterministic model at weather stations while beating it in relative economic value at every lead time, and remains considerably behind the operational ECMWF IFS ensemble. The encoder branch behaves as observation-driven uncertainty. Component-attributed uncertainty makes end-to-end forecasts more transparent, a step toward observation-driven digital twins of the atmosphere.