Extreme Weather Forecasting

Latest papers

14 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 18, 2026

Beyond the record: evaluating probabilistic AI weather forecasts deep in the tail

Can probabilistic artificial intelligence (AI) weather forecasts retain skill beyond their training domain? We compare four state-of-the-art AI models (ArchesWeatherGen, U-Cast, WeatherNext2 and GenCast-mini) with the physics-based IFS-ENS over land in 2022, at 1.5° resolution and lead times of 2--10 days. Monthly ERA5 records from 1979--2021 define common historical boundaries, and we characterize new records set in 2022 by their depth, i.e., the exceedance margin relative to local historical variability. Two proper scores, record-threshold weighted CRPS and Brier score, assess the magnitude and probability of record exceedances across all eligible cases, retaining both missed extremes and false alarms. Verified against ERA5, AI models outperform IFS-ENS for heat and cold records at almost every lead and depth. For heat, the advantage strengthens with depth, partly because IFS-ENS over-forecasts deep records, and largely persists for deeper records under HRES-fc0 verification. For wind, gains erode for deeper records and longer leads. Better tail scores can nevertheless coexist with aggregate probability deficits or surpluses, and some improvements arise chiefly on non-exceedances. Increasing underprediction on progressively more extreme observed subsets can also arise through outcome selection, even for an ideal conditional-mean forecast. These findings establish that native probabilistic AI ensembles retain, and for heat increase, their advantage over IFS-ENS as thresholds move beyond local records, although all advantages narrow with lead time. They caution against generalizing the extrapolation failure reported for deterministic AI forecasts to probabilistic systems, and motivate common verification conventions that separate comparative tail skill, performance on realized extremes, and probabilistic calibration.

Bastiaan Van Velthoven, Cas Decancq, Diego G. Miralles +2

Weather Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting Extreme Weather Forecasting

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Oct 15, 2026

Can AI Forecast the Extremes? Evaluating Probabilistic Weather Models on Tropical Cyclones

Weather prediction is undergoing an important shift, with data-driven AI models outperforming leading numerical weather prediction systems on average at a fraction of the computational cost. Yet, whether this success extends to extreme events remains contested. Earlier evaluations have exposed important shortcomings, but have largely focused on deterministic models and metrics, leaving the capabilities of the latest probabilistic models less understood. We conduct an extensive benchmark of tropical cyclone forecasting, comparing GenCast, FourCastNet 3, and FGN with ECMWF's operational physics-based ensemble, IFS-ENS. We develop a suite of probabilistic metrics and diagnostic analyses to assess cyclone tracking, intensity biases, uncertainty, and the wind-pressure relationship that characterizes storm structure. We find that, despite remaining limitations in intensity and ensemble spread, leading AI models substantially outperform IFS-ENS in cyclone tracking: FGN achieves better probabilistic location scores for 90% of evaluated storms in 2025. Further analyses reveal model-specific failure modes and suggest a lingering influence of pretraining data, pointing to opportunities for targeted improvement. Nonetheless, these results suggest that AI models are capable of capturing physical relationships that remain predictive well beyond typical weather conditions, motivating further investigation into how these capabilities emerge and how to strengthen them.

Nathan Chalumeau, Xavier Renard, Remi Meynadier +3

INRIA, Paris, France · AXA, Paris, France · Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, F-75005 Paris, France +1

Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting Weather Forecasting Extreme Weather Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting Forecasting Benchmarks

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Sep 28, 2026

MW-Nowcast: Six-hour ensemble nowcasting of extreme precipitation

Extending reliable nowcasting of extreme precipitation could provide critical additional time for warnings and emergency response during high-impact events such as flash floods. Radar-based generative machine-learning models have enabled skilful hyperlocal precipitation nowcasting, but accurate prediction of intense precipitation remains confined to the first few hours. Because storm-scale structure is predictable for longer than individual cells, a natural strategy is to predict that structure while generatively modelling only the uncertain local growth, decay, reorganisation and initiation of storms. Here we present Microsoft Weather Nowcast (MW-Nowcast), a six-hour ensemble radar nowcasting model that jointly learns a deterministic predictor to capture organised precipitation structure shared across ensemble members, and a generator to produce diverse local residuals around this shared prediction. Across independent test data from the United States, Europe and China, MW-Nowcast achieves higher detection skill than leading methods for heavy and extreme precipitation throughout the 6 h horizon. For the most intense rainfall, MW-Nowcast doubles the available warning time across all three regions, delivering 6 h forecasts with skill previously limited to 3 h for the leading generative baseline. A cost-loss decision analysis shows that MW-Nowcast retains substantial value for a broad range of applications even at 4-6 h, where alternative methods offer little benefit. These additional hours can give forecasters and emergency managers the time to warn and act before extreme rainfall strikes, helping to protect lives and property.

Ning Wang, Zuliang Fang, Weixin Jin +19

Microsoft Corporation. · City University of Hong Kong. · University of Cambridge.

Precipitation Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting Generative Modeling Precipitation Nowcasting Extreme Weather Forecasting

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Sep 26, 2026

Global Evaluation of AI and NWP Precipitation Forecasts During Atmospheric River Events

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) produce many of the world's most extreme precipitation events and hydrometeorological hazards. Although artificial intelligence weather prediction (AIWP) models have demonstrated skill comparable to or exceeding numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems for large-scale atmospheric variables, their ability to forecast AR-related precipitation remains insufficiently characterized globally. Here, we evaluate 24-hour precipitation forecasts from the Global Forecast System (GFS), Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), GraphCast, and Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) from Day 1 through Day 10 globally and across North America, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Using the Extreme Weather Bench framework, forecasts are evaluated against Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) observations using measures of precipitation magnitude, spatial structure, and localization. GraphCast and AIFS exhibit greater spatial skill than GFS and GEFS, particularly for heavy precipitation and at longer lead times, and better preserve the spatial organization of AR-related precipitation through Day 10. However, this improved spatial skill does not translate into accurate precipitation magnitudes. AIWP models tend to overpredict moderate-to-heavy accumulations while underpredicting the heaviest precipitation at longer lead times, whereas NWP systems develop pronounced dry biases. These results reveal distinct strengths and limitations of AIWP for high-impact precipitation forecasting and provide a reproducible benchmark.

Marina Vicens-Miquel, Taylor Mandelbaum, Amy McGovern +2

School of Meteorology and School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, 73072, OK, USA. · NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography, Norman, 73072, OK, USA. · Brightband, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Precipitation Forecasting Weather Forecasting Extreme Weather Forecasting Forecasting Benchmarks

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Aug 31, 2026

Diffusion-Based Refinement for Kilometer-Scale Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting

Localized extreme precipitation is a major trigger of urban flash floods and landslides, yet producing nowcasts that combine fine spatial detail with probabilistic uncertainty remains challenging. Here we introduce exPreCast-ENS, a conditional residual diffusion framework that transforms the deterministic 4 km radar nowcaster exPreCast into a 1 km probabilistic ensemble while correcting systematic forecast errors. Conditioning on both the forecast and preceding radar observations lets the ensemble-mean correct the baseline rather than perturb it, while members represent unresolved fine-scale variability. Over the Korean Peninsula, skill improves with ensemble size. In two high-impact events in 2023, a 30-member ensemble recovers 38-47% of heavy-rain pixels missed by exPreCast while retaining approximately 95% of its correct detections and alarming on under 1% of the pixels it correctly left clear. The method generates a 1-h forecast in 3.4 s on a single GPU and yields consistent improvements on the French regional MeteoNet radar dataset.

Dohyun Park, Changhoon Song, Tengyuan Chang +2

Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. · Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul National University, Seoul,2026 Republic of Korea. · Department of Environmental Management, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Precipitation Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting Precipitation Downscaling Conditional Diffusion Models Precipitation Nowcasting Extreme Weather Forecasting

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Jul 31, 2026

Do AI weather models miss extremes?

AI weather models are often reported to underestimate extremes, but most evidence concerns deterministic regression models verified against reanalysis. We evaluate twelve physical and AI forecast models against ECMWF IFS using ten months of European station observations. The evaluation covers 10 m wind, 2 m temperature, solar radiation, and precipitation within regimes defined from a fixed ERA5 1991-2020 climatology. We find no uniform AI-specific deficit in the tails. Several AI models remain more accurate than IFS under extreme conditions, while others deteriorate markedly; comparable variation occurs among physical models. Every model nevertheless exhibits a common conditional-error pattern, overpredicting low observations and underpredicting high observations. Attenuation of extreme values therefore does not imply a uniform loss of relative skill: tail performance depends on the model, variable, and evaluation setting rather than on whether the forecast is produced by AI or physical numerical modelling.

Marvin Vincent Gabler, Roberto Molinaro, Niall Siegenheim +5

Jua.ai AG

Extreme Weather Forecasting Weather Forecasting

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Jul 30, 2026

Weather Emulators at the Frontier of Heat Extremes Predictability

Atmospheric predictability declines rapidly beyond the next ten days, such that forecasts at longer lead times primarily convey large-scale trends rather than specific states. Yet in a warming world, improving early warnings of extreme heat is an increasingly critical challenge. Here we evaluate six state-of-the-art deep learning weather emulators - Pangu-Weather, FuXi, ArchesWeather, AIFS, GraphCast and Aurora - alongside leading dynamical systems and statistical baselines in forecasting global near-surface temperature and extreme heat at lead times of 10-15 days. We find that several emulators rival or even surpass physics-based forecasts in deterministic temperature skill, but do so at the cost of reduced spectral fidelity, in a process widely known as blurring. While all models show some degree of predictive skill for extreme heat, most emulators under-represent peak intensities, and IFS recall is greater than that of any of the emulators. These results highlight both the emerging potential of AI to enhance extended range temperature prediction, and the remaining challenges in delivering reliable, actionable early warnings in a changing climate.

Cas Decancq, Thomas Mortier, Jessica Keune +1

1Hydro-Climate Extremes Lab (H-CEL), Department of Environment, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. · 2European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading, United Kingdom.

Weather Forecasting Extreme Weather Forecasting

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Jul 27, 2026

SIREN: Towards End-to-End Extreme-Weather Early Warning with Experience-Grounded LLM Agents

Early warning of extreme weather is essential for mitigating the societal, economic, and environmental risks posed by hazardous weather events. However, expert-centered warning workflows are costly, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale throughout the warning-to-action process. Although recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) agents have enabled the automation of weather-related tasks, existing studies remain centered on isolated scientific tasks and overlook the chain of interdependent processes required for operational extreme-weather early warning. To bridge this gap, this study investigates automated end-to-end extreme-weather early warning through LLM agents. We first develop SIREN-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 600 question-answer instances across 19 tasks, and covering four individual warning procedures and an end-to-end warning chain. Evaluation on SIREN-Bench reveals substantial capability gaps in existing weather agent frameworks. This motivates us to develop SIREN, an experience-grounded agent framework inspired by experts' use of historical cases, which combines an agentic execution environment integrating heterogeneous weather evidence and tools with a family of agent harnesses that exploit historical cases through retrieval, skill distillation, and predictive modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIREN outperforms weather-agent baselines on both individual warning procedures and end-to-end warning chains.

Hang Ni, Weijia Zhang, Fan Liu +2

Artificial Intelligence Thrust The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Guangzhou, China · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Hong Kong, China · Otto Poon Center for Climate Resilience and Sustainability, The World Sustainable Development Institute.

AI Agent Benchmarks Extreme Weather Forecasting LLM Agents LLM Agent Harnesses Weather Forecasting Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

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Jul 14, 2026

TSSM: Triaxial State Space Model for Global Station Weather Forecasting with Temporal-Variable-Historical Modeling

Global Station Weather Forecasting (GSWF) is pivotal for localized and extreme weather prediction over key regions. Despite efforts to exploit look-back windows, existing methods show limited accuracy gains and struggle with extreme events and error accumulation. These limitations stem from overreliance on short-term patterns, which are insufficient to capture chaotic weather dynamics, especially under partial observations. To address this problem, we propose a novel Triaxial State Space Model (TSSM) with a history-enhanced Temporal-VariableHistorical paradigm, which incorporates period-aligned historical weather data to compensate for long-term, large-scale periodic, and full-window weather patterns beyond the temporal lookback window. Specifically, TSSM stacks historical samples into period-aligned batches, where forecasting is causally supported by historical and current observations. Temporal, variable, and historical scanning are designed to capture axial temporal dependencies, variable correlations, and historical evolution. This structure is hierarchically shared to model seasonal to extreme events while alleviating misalignment across historical patterns. TSSM achieves SOTA performance on Weather-5K, the largest station weather dataset to date, with 10% and 61% gains in accuracy and extreme event metrics, and obtains 95% best or second-best results on human-involved datasets. Its advantages are more pronounced in long-horizon and iterative forecasting, reaching a 37.5% gain at 240h and up to 103.5% under a 48h times 5 iterative setting. Moreover, TSSM retains > 90% performance under up to 80% missing observations, compared with < 43% for baselines, demonstrating robustness and practical potential for reliable GSWF in global in-situ observation networks.

Songru Yang, Zili Liu, Tao Han +7

Department of Aerospace Intelligent Science and Technology, School of Astronautics, Beihang University, and with the Key Laboratory of Spacecraft Design Optimization and Dynamic Simulation Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai 200232, China · Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China +1

Long-Term Time Series Forecasting Extreme Weather Forecasting State Space Models Weather Forecasting

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Jun 1, 2026

Scalable Uncertainty Quantification for Extreme Weather Forecasting via Empirical Neural Tangent Kernels

Deep learning weather models now match numerical weather prediction accuracy while running orders of magnitude faster, but produce deterministic forecasts without uncertainty estimates, a critical gap for high-stakes decisions during extreme weather events. This paper proposes Neural Tangent Kernel-based uncertainty quantification (NTK-UQ) using last-layer empirical features. Theoretical analysis predicts that UQ quality is architecture-dependent through two mechanisms. First, a variance collapse mechanism explains when UQ fails: when the eigenvalue truncation rank approaches the effective rank of the feature space, the GP correction term consumes nearly all prior variance, destroying discrimination between tropical cyclones and routine conditions; architectures with concentrated spectra (spectral operators) require aggressive truncation (

k \leq 10

), while attention-based models tolerate full-rank computation. Second, decomposition performance depends on the non-Gaussian, heavy-tailed structure of extreme weather: Independent Component Analysis exploits higher-order statistics (kurtosis, negentropy) to isolate heavy-tailed extreme-event features, achieving higher discrimination than singular value decomposition, which captures only second-order variance. A data-driven selection rule chooses ICA or SVD from the feature eigenspectrum concentration ratio, correctly prescribing the superior decomposition for all four evaluated architectures. Compared to split conformal prediction (the natural post-hoc baseline), NTK-UQ achieves 31--37% sharper prediction intervals at 90% coverage, and uniquely produces adaptive intervals that scale with extreme event severity, which conformal prediction cannot achieve by construction. The framework requires no retraining; inference-time uncertainty requires only a single matrix-vector product per sample.

Jose Marie Antonio Miñoza, Rex Gregor Laylo, Sebastian C. Ibañez

Center for AI Research · Department of Education · Makati, Philippines

Uncertainty Quantification Independent Component Analysis Extreme Weather Forecasting Neural Tangent Kernel Regression Prediction Intervals Weather Forecasting

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May 24, 2026

RealBench: Benchmarking Data-Driven Numerical Weather Forecasting Under Operational Conditions and Extreme Event Challenges

Accurate evaluation of weather forecasting models is critical for their reliable deployment in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on reanalysis products such as ERA5, which are generated through delayed data assimilation and do not reflect the constraints of real-time operational forecasting, thereby resulting in a systematic mismatch between benchmark performance and real-world forecasting. In this work, we introduce RealBench, a next-generation benchmark for AI weather forecasting that emphasizes realistic evaluation under operational conditions. RealBench features a strictly out-of-distribution test set spanning 2025 to eliminate data leakage and capture recent atmospheric regimes. It integrates multiple data sources, including low-latency operational analysis and a large-scale global in-situ observation dataset comprising over 10,000 stations, enabling direct evaluation against real atmospheric measurements. Beyond standard global metrics, RealBench provides a comprehensive evaluation framework for high-impact extreme events, including heatwaves, cold surges, and tropical cyclones, using event-specific metrics that better reflect real-world forecasting priorities. The evaluation results reveal substantial discrepancies between reanalysis-based metrics and real-world performance, particularly concerning extreme events. By highlighting the limitations of existing benchmarks, this work establishes a more faithful and operationally relevant evaluation paradigm, providing a rigorous foundation for advancing next-generation AI weather forecasting systems. The benchmark implementation is available at: https://github.com/lixruize-del/NWP-Benchmark.

Ruize Li, Zhibin Wen, Tao Han +5

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Nanjing University · Southern University of Science and Technology +2

Benchmark Design Forecasting Benchmarks Extreme Weather Forecasting Weather Forecasting

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May 1, 2026

Extreme Weather Bench: A framework and benchmark for evaluation of high-impact weather

Forecasting the wide variety of high-impact weather events experienced globally is a challenge for both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models and it is critical that such models be properly verified before deployment. Although AI weather models are rapidly evolving, much of their evaluation is currently done either with a global-scale evaluation or by hand-picking a small number of case studies or a region. A widely-used open-source benchmark suite focusing on high-impact weather will help to drive the science forward for all scales of weather models, as it has for other AI fields. Here we introduce Extreme Weather Bench (EWB), a new community-driven benchmark suite that facilitates model validation and verification on a variety of high-impact hazards that matter to people around the globe. EWB provides a standard set of case studies (spanning across multiple spatial and temporal scales and different parts of the weather spectrum), observational data, impact-based metrics, and open-source code for users to evaluate their models. Verifying that a model works against a standard set of case studies, especially events that are high-impact for the general public, is a key piece of improving the trustworthiness of AI models. EWB will help to drive the science forward for all weather models, enabling true comparisons across models and evaluating models on specific high-impact phenomena through the use of case studies. EWB is a free open-source community-driven system and will continue to evolve to include additional phenomena, test cases and metrics in collaboration with the worldwide weather and forecast verification community.

Amy McGovern, Taylor Mandelbaum, Daniel Rothenberg +6

Brightband, San Francisco, CA, USA. · School of Meteorology and School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman, 73072, OK, USA. · Bureau of Meteorology, Australia. +5

Forecasting Benchmarks Extreme Weather Forecasting Weather Forecasting

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Mar 17, 2026

Target Concept Tuning Improves Extreme Weather Forecasting

Deep learning models for meteorological forecasting often fail in rare but high-impact events such as typhoons, where relevant data is scarce. Existing fine-tuning methods typically face a trade-off between overlooking these extreme events and overfitting them at the expense of overall performance. We propose TaCT, an interpretable concept-gated fine-tuning framework that solves the aforementioned issue by selective model improvement: models are adapted specifically for failure cases while preserving performance in common scenarios. To this end, TaCT automatically discovers failure-related internal concepts using Sparse Autoencoders and counterfactual analysis, and updates parameters only when the corresponding concepts are activated, rather than applying uniform adaptation. Experiments show consistent improvements in typhoon forecasting across different regions without degrading other meteorological variables. The identified concepts correspond to physically meaningful circulation patterns, revealing model biases and supporting trustworthy adaptation in scientific forecasting tasks. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Concept-Gated-Fine-tune-62AC.

Shijie Ren, Xinyue Gu, Ziheng Peng +6

Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China

Extreme Weather Forecasting Weather Forecasting Fine-Tuning Selective Fine-Tuning

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Mar 10, 2026

Developing Machine Learning-Based Watch-to-Warning Severe Weather Guidance from the Warn-on-Forecast System

While machine learning (ML) post-processing of convection-allowing model (CAM) output for severe weather hazards (large hail, damaging winds, and/or tornadoes) has shown promise for very short lead times (0-3 hours), its application to slightly longer forecast windows remains relatively underexplored. In this study, we develop and evaluate a grid-based ML framework to predict the probability of severe weather hazards over the next 2-6 hours using forecast output from the Warn-on-Forecast System (WoFS). Our dataset includes WoFS ensemble forecasts valid every 5 minutes out to 6 hours from 108 days during the 2019--2023 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiments. We train ML models to generate probabilistic forecasts of severe weather akin to Storm Prediction Center outlooks (i.e., likelihood of a tornado, severe wind, or severe hail event within 36 km of each point). We compare a histogram gradient-boosted tree (HGBT) model and a deep learning U-Net approach against a carefully calibrated baseline generated from 2-5 km updraft helicity. Results indicate that the HGBT and U-Net outperform the baseline, particularly at higher probability thresholds. The HGBT achieves the best performance metrics, but predicted probabilities cap at 60% while the U-net forecasts extend to 100%. Similar to previous studies, the U-Net produces spatially smoother guidance than the tree-based method. These findings add to the growing evidence of the effectiveness of ML-based CAM post-processing for providing short-term severe weather guidance.

Montgomery Flora, Samuel Varga, Corey Potvin +1

Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma · NOAA/OAR/National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, Oklahoma · AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography +5

Extreme Weather Forecasting Weather Forecasting Probabilistic Forecasting

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