Evaluation of Machine Learning Techniques for Forecast Uncertainty Quantification

Producing an accurate weather forecast and a reliable quantification of its uncertainty is an open scientific challenge. Ensemble forecasting is, so far, the most successful approach to produce relevant forecasts along with an estimation of their uncertainty. The main limitations of ensemble forecasting are the high computational cost and the difficulty to capture and quantify different sources of uncertainty, particularly those associated with model errors. In this work proof-of-concept model experiments are conducted to examine the performance of ANNs trained to predict a corrected state of the system and the state uncertainty using only a single deterministic forecast as input. We compare different training strategies: one based on a direct training using the mean and spread of an ensemble forecast as target, the other ones rely on an indirect training strategy using a deterministic forecast as target in which the uncertainty is implicitly learned from the data. For the last approach two alternative loss functions are proposed and evaluated, one based on the data observation likelihood and the other one based on a local estimation of the error. The performance of the networks is examined at different lead times and in scenarios with and without model errors. Experiments using the Lorenz'96 model show that the ANNs are able to emulate some of the properties of ensemble forecasts like the filtering of the most unpredictable modes and a state-dependent quantification of the forecast uncertainty. Moreover, ANNs provide a reliable estimation of the forecast uncertainty in the presence of model error.