Sebastian Lerch
@sebastianlerch.bsky.social
710 followers 170 following 41 posts
Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Marburg, interested in probabilistic forecasting, statistics, ML, with applications in weather, energy, environmental sciences, and beyond
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sebastianlerch.bsky.social
The original data is available at dx.doi.org/10.35097/EOv.... We also provide code for matching forecasts and observations, and for an exemplary comparions of ML-based post-processing models.
Operational convection-permitting COSMO/ICON ensemble predictions at observation sites (CIENS)
dx.doi.org
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
Forecast are available for 55 meteorological variables mapped to station locations and spatially aggregated forecasts from surrounding grid points, for NWP models initialized at 00 and 12 UTC, in hourly lead times up to 21h. Observations of 6 variables are available at 170 stations.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
The potential CRPS of the HRES forecast aligns well with the CRPS of the operational IFS ensemble.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
AIWP models show skillful forecasts for lead times of up to 10 days when compared to the ERA5 climatology in terms of the potential CRPS.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
Results on WeatherBench 2 data confirm fast-paced progress, with AIWP models, in particular GraphCast, showing improvements in the potential CRPS over the HRES model
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
Step 2: We then compute the CRPS on the test dataset. The resulting "potential CRPS" quantifies potential probabilistic predictive performance and serves as a proxy for the mean CRPS of real-time, operational
probabilistic products.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
We propose a new measure for fair and meaningful comparisons of deterministic AIWP and NWP models:

Step 1: We subject the deterministic backbone of AIWP and NWP models post hoc to the same
postprocessing technique (isotonic distributional regression) on the test dataset.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
There has been fast-paced progress in AI-based weather prediction. However, fair comparisons to physics-based NWP models are challenging:
- AI models are trained on the MSE, and might have an advantage in MSE-based comparison
- Comparisons may use different ground truth data (ERA5 vs IFS analysis)
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
In addition to forecast evaluation via proper scoring rules, we also evaluate the forecasts from an economic perspective by considering trading strategies that utilize the multivariate probabilistic information.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
We propose a generative ML model for multivariate, probabilistic forecasting of time series of electricity prices, and compare to state-of-the-art statistical benchmark models.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
Personal update: After almost 10 years at KIT, I will move to the University of Marburg as a professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in April. I will of course miss the many great colleagues and students at KIT, but am very much looking forward to exciting new opportunities.
Image: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/File:Marburg_Oberstadt_von_SO.jpg
Reposted by Sebastian Lerch
copernicusecmwf.bsky.social
The AI Weather Quest is now open for participation! This @ecmwf.int led competition, endorsed by the @wmo-global.bsky.social, challenges participants to push the boundaries of sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasting using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
🔗 bit.ly/4b1ulaB
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
New preprint: "Learning low-dimensional representations of ensemble forecast fields using autoencoder-based methods" with Jieyu Chen and Kevin Höhlein: arxiv.org/abs/2502.04409. We propose dimensionality reduction methods tailored to ensemble simulations of gridded fields.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
We further compare the post-processing approaches to a NN-based direct forecasting model, which predicts PV power based on the weather inputs without the intermediate conversion via the model chain, and achieves almost the same performance.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
Applying post-processing to the PV power predictions obtained as the output of the model chain is the most important contributor to improving the forecasts, whereas the effects of post-processing the weather inputs are negligible.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
In a case study on a benchmark dataset from the Jacumba solar plant in the US, we find that post-processing generally improves the GHI and PV power forecasts. Neural network-based methods achieve slightly better performance than statistical approaches.
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
We investigate the use of post-processing and ML in model chain approaches, where different strategies are possible: Post-processing only the weather inputs, post-processing only the PV power predictions, or applying post-processing in both steps (or none at all).
sebastianlerch.bsky.social
Probabilistic PV power forecasts are often based on model chain approaches, where conversion models estimate PV generation based on weather predictions. However, weather prediction models make systematic errors and require post-processing.