Comment by numbers_guy
15 hours ago
I can assure you that anyone who touches numerical simulations of any kind (physicists, engineers, chemists, biophysicts...etc) has tried their hand at ML based surrogate models in the last 5 years, so it's not like they aren't being tested. From my experience, they aren't very robust. Weather modeling is actually one of the very few areas where it seems to work half decently.
Why does it work for weather at all? Is there something that the mathematical models are over-simulating? Is weather easier to predict than we thought? Just curious what the intuition is to regarding the success of ML weather modelling...
There is just A LOT of data available- usually an order of magnitude more than in any other related problem.
And general weather forecasts are not that hard - we have semi useful forecasts for more than 50 years. It’s when you want to do something special: long range, nowcasting of convective storm, other extreme weather etc. that is hard. And even then it’s as much a problem of input data accuracy than the models themselves.
Traditional physics based weather models also rely heavily on physical parameterization for sub grid scale processes (think clouds, microphysics of rain sleet snow, etc) so even the deterministic physics models are learned approximations from data.
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