YingLong: Skillful High Resolution Regional Short Term Forecasting with Boundary Smoothing

In the realm of numerical weather forecasting, achieving higher resolution demands increased computational resources and time investment, and leveraging deep learning networks trained solely on data significantly reduces the time expenditure during forecasting. Recently, several global forecasting artificial-intelligence-based models are developed, which are mainly trained on reanalysis dataset with a spatial resolution of approximately 25km. However, regional forecasting prefers a higher spatial resolution, and boundary information for the region also plays an important role in regional forecasting, which turns out to be a major difference from global forecasting. Here we introduce a high resolution, short-term regional weather forecasting, artificial-intelligence-based model called 'YingLong', which is capable of hourly predicting weather fields including wind speed, temperature, and specific humidity at a 3km resolution. YingLong utilizes a parallel structure of global and local blocks to capture multiscale meteorological features and is trained on analysis dataset. Additionally, the necessary information around the regional boundary is introduced to YingLong through the boundary smoothing strategy, which significantly improves the regional forecasting results. By comparing forecast results with those from WRF-ARW, one of the best numerical prediction models, YingLong demonstrates superior forecasting performances in most cases, especially on surface variables.