Mitigating Time Discretization Challenges with WeatherODE: A Sandwich Physics-Driven Neural ODE for Weather Forecasting

18 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Weather Forecasting, NeuralODE, Time discretization
TL;DR: Mitigating Time Discretization Challenges with WeatherODE: A Sandwich Physics-Driven Neural ODE for Weather Forecasting
Abstract: In the field of weather forecasting, traditional models often grapple with discretization errors and time-dependent source discrepancies, which limit their predictive performance. In this paper, we present WeatherODE, a novel one-stage, physics-driven ordinary differential equation (ODE) model designed to enhance weather forecasting accuracy. By leveraging wave equation theory and integrating a time-dependent source model, WeatherODE effectively addresses the challenges associated with time-discretization error and dynamic atmospheric processes. Moreover, we design a CNN-ViT-CNN sandwich structure, facilitating efficient learning dynamics tailored for distinct yet interrelated tasks with varying optimization biases in advection equation estimation. Through rigorous experiments, WeatherODE demonstrates superior performance in both global and regional weather forecasting tasks, outperforming recent state-of-the-art approaches by significant margins of over 40.0\% and 31.8\% in root mean square error (RMSE), respectively. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WeatherODE-5C13/.
Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)
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Submission Number: 1411
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