Skillful Kilometer-Scale Regional Weather Forecasting via Global and Regional Coupling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a global-regional coupling framework using a Transformer-based global model and a high-resolution regional network, achieving superior kilometer-scale weather forecasts over China by dynamically focusing on critical regions.

Contribution

It presents a novel bidirectional coupling module, ScaleMixer, that enables effective cross-scale feature interaction for high-resolution weather prediction.

Findings

Outperforms operational NWP and AI baselines in accuracy.

Captures fine-grained phenomena like orographic winds and Foehn warming.

Demonstrates global coherence with high-resolution detail.

Abstract

Data-driven weather models have advanced global medium-range forecasting, yet high-resolution regional prediction remains challenging due to unresolved multiscale interactions between large-scale dynamics and small-scale processes such as terrain-induced circulations and coastal effects. This paper presents a global-regional coupling framework for kilometer-scale regional weather forecasting that synergistically couples a pretrained Transformer-based global model with a high-resolution regional network via a novel bidirectional coupling module, ScaleMixer. ScaleMixer dynamically identifies meteorologically critical regions through adaptive key-position sampling and enables cross-scale feature interaction through dedicated attention mechanisms. The framework produces forecasts at $0.05^\circ$ ($\sim 5 \mathrm{km}$ ) and 1-hour resolution over China, significantly outperforming operational NWP and AI baselines on both gridded reanalysis data and real-time weather station observations. It exhibits exceptional skill in capturing fine-grained phenomena such as orographic wind patterns and Foehn warming, demonstrating effective global-scale coherence with high-resolution fidelity. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ScaleMixer-6B66.