PeakWeather: MeteoSwiss Weather Station Measurements for Spatiotemporal Deep Learning

TL;DR

PeakWeather is a comprehensive, high-resolution dataset of Swiss weather station data over 8 years, designed to facilitate machine learning research in weather prediction, imputation, and sensor applications, supporting diverse spatiotemporal tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces PeakWeather, a new large-scale, high-quality weather dataset with diverse variables and topographical context, serving as a benchmark for machine learning in meteorology.

Findings

Dataset enables advanced spatiotemporal modeling

Baseline ensemble forecasts provided for comparison

Supports research in forecasting, imputation, and sensor data analysis

Abstract

Accurate weather forecasts are essential for supporting a wide range of activities and decision-making processes, as well as mitigating the impacts of adverse weather events. While traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) remains the cornerstone of operational forecasting, machine learning is emerging as a powerful alternative for fast, flexible, and scalable predictions. We introduce PeakWeather, a high-quality dataset of surface weather observations collected every 10 minutes over more than 8 years from the ground stations of the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss's measurement network. The dataset includes a diverse set of meteorological variables from 302 station locations distributed across Switzerland's complex topography and is complemented with topographical indices derived from digital height models for context. Ensemble forecasts from the currently operational high-resolution NWP model are provided as a baseline forecast against which to evaluate new approaches. The dataset's richness supports a broad spectrum of spatiotemporal tasks, including time series forecasting at various scales, graph structure learning, imputation, and virtual sensing. As such, PeakWeather serves as a real-world benchmark to advance both foundational machine learning research, meteorology, and sensor-based applications.