Subseasonal Climate Prediction in the Western US using Bayesian Spatial Models

Subseasonal climate forecasting is the task of predicting climate variables, such as temperature and precipitation, in a two-week to two-month time horizon. The primary predictors for such prediction problem are spatio-temporal satellite and ground measurements of a variety of climate variables in the atmosphere, ocean, and land, which however have rather limited predictive signal at the subseasonal time horizon. We propose a carefully constructed spatial hierarchical Bayesian regression model that makes use of the inherent spatial structure of the subseasonal climate prediction task. We use our Bayesian model to then derive decision-theoretically optimal point estimates with respect to various performance measures of interest to climate science. As we show, our approach handily improves on various off-the-shelf ML baselines. Since our method is based on a Bayesian framework, we are also able to quantify the uncertainty in our predictions, which is particularly crucial for difficult tasks such as the subseasonal prediction, where we expect any model to have considerable uncertainty at different test locations under different scenarios.