Artificial intelligence, data assimilation, and data-driven surrogate models for the climate
By Marc Bocquet
Artificial intelligence, and particularly deep learning, revolutionised numerical weather prediction (NWP) in 2023. Several teams from giant tech companies have proposed surrogate models for high-resolution global atmospheric dynamics. These models achieve the performance levels of the deterministic IFS of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, as well as its ensemble prediction variant. In this presentation, I will discuss the techniques used to construct these models, their scope and limitations, and illustrate the concepts with our own models and results, in NWP and sea-ice models for climate. I will also discuss the integration of such surrogate models with data assimilation for the improvement of NWP, as well as some more fundamental issues related to the end-to-end approaches to data assimilation.