The website claims to be using DL which may mean less of a model-centric approach? The expertise of the people at the top of the organization, on this problem, seems a little thin, TBH. And, no stated validation results at all? Without such details, this is just marketing.
It would be interesting to see how this behaves for longer prediction times and across a range of difficult forcing conditions off the ocean in the BA.
I agree, this generally left me feeling skeptical. I know of Luca Delle Monache on the advisory team, through colleagues who have researched under him at Scripps and they spoke highly of him. But yes, there is a lot left to the imagination here.
With regards to the sfbay specifically I used to work with a fairly high resolution wind model for the bay (this was a more traditional dynamic based simulation) and it worked pretty well overall, but every time a storm blew through it would crash. This ultimately had to do with the relatively steep terrain in the bay specifically (and the physics configurations we were using in the actual model).
Even if they are using DL they still need initial and boundary conditions. As I said there are a ton of weather stations around so I could imagine a DL type approach that looked at terrain elevation, and recent + historical observations to initialize a forecast, but I still imagine that boundary conditions would have to be provided by nesting this in a larger model somehow. Then again, I'm not a DL expert at all so there are probably some newer stuff in this field that I'm just out of date on.
Its really expensive to run your own dynamic forecast model, at a refresh rate acceptable for an actual forecast, at this resolution. That's why I suspected its taking existing weather models and downscaling them with DL techniques, but I can't really know just by looking.
We are currently integrating with Forecast Watch a 3rd party that analyses and compare various forecasting systems [1]. Please stay tuned until we integrate our APIs. I will be updating this thread when it is ready.
It would be interesting to see how this behaves for longer prediction times and across a range of difficult forcing conditions off the ocean in the BA.