Comment by counters

> Problem is that the WN3 grid is still quite rough (5km) - but a that's a brutal improvement for many places compared to many other global models.

That's a pretty apples-and-oranges comparison. One would almost always use a high-resolution regional model if you needed certain details for different forecasting applications like renewable energy.

It's also worth noting that the 5km outputs are from a model decoder head that was trained against temperature and dewpoint at surface stations. According to the Rasp et al (2026) preprint, this head was designed for continuous sampling; the choice of a 5km grid is arbitrary. What we don't actually know is how well the model handles shocks like a frontal passage or impacts from things like outflow from storms - or even evaporative cooling from precipitation. We are limited to the output that DeepMind publishes; we can't run the model and stress test these things on our own.

That's all a long way to say that the 5km resolution is (a) limited to temperature fields, and (b) we don't know if the "additional" resolution has any impact whatsoever on the phenomena that one would typically use a mesoscale-resolving forecast for.