The Digital Revolution of Weather and Climate Predictions
Peter Düben (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF))

This talk will outline three revolutions that happened in the past decades in the development of Earth system models that are used to perform weather and climate predictions. The quiet revolution has leveraged better observations and more compute power to allow for constant improvements of prediction quality of the last decades, the digital revolution has enabled us to perform km-scale simulations on modern supercomputers that further increase the quality of our models, and the machine learning revolution has now shown that machine learned weather models are often competitive with physics based weather models for many forecast scores while being easier, smaller and cheaper. This talk will summarize the past developments, explain current challenges and opportunities, and outline how the future of Earth system modelling will look like. In particular, regarding machine-learned foundation models in a physical domain such as Earth system science.