ECMWF's AIFS Marine prototype forecasts waves and sea ice with machine learning

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) said on Oct 12 that it has extended its machine-learning forecasting system, AIFS, into a prototype called AIFS Marine that forecasts the atmosphere, ocean waves, sea ice and surface-ocean fields in a single model, described in a preprint on arXiv. In ECMWF’s evaluation, medium-range accuracy typically matched gaining roughly one forecast day over its physics-based systems, and significant wave-height errors fell by about 10% against satellite observations. ECMWF said sea-surface height is the exception: the model develops a negative bias as lead time grows, which it says it will address.