On the robustness of AI model forecast skill and initial condition uncertainty of the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heatwave
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AI weather models are becoming valuable tools for predicting the weather. While AI models’ general forecasts are known to be skillful, their forecast skill of extreme events is not fully understood. The 2021 Pacific Northwest (PNW) heatwave is a good case study for AI models because it falls outside of the distribution of heat waves in AI model training datasets.Here, we investigate the forecast performance of 8 AI models (AIFS, Gencast, NeuralGCM, Graphcast, Fuxi, Pangu, Fourcastnet, FourcastnetV2) of the 2021 PNW heatwave. Despite the event being out of the training dataset distribution, their forecast performance is comparable to that of a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model (IFS). Specifically, AI models and IFS can accurately forecast the heatwave for lead times less than 7 days.Two recent studies suggest the predictability barrier of the PNW heatwave may be due to an initial condition observation error. Leach et al. (2024) found that the 26th ensemble member of a 250 member IFS forecast accurately forecasts the heatwave 12 days in advance. Vonich and Hakim (2024) used backpropagation in Graphcast to find an optimal initial condition that leads to an accurate forecast 10 days in advance. Are these initial conditions robust across an ensemble of AI models? And do these initial conditions point to a unique solution?We find a large spread in forecast accuracy when running the 8 AI models with the Leach et al. (2024) and Vonich & Hakim (2024) initial conditions. Furthermore we ran 1000 member ensembles in NeuralGCM and find initial conditions that lead to an accurate long-term forecast are not unique. These results suggest that the improvement in forecast accuracty to certain initial conditions may not necessarily be due to the initial conditions being closer to ground truth but rather they are due to cancelation of model error.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".