Concept drift of simple forecast models as a diagnostic of low-frequency, regime-dependent atmospheric reorganisation

Abstract

Data-driven weather prediction models implicitly assume that the statistical relationship between predictors and targets is stationary. Under anthropogenic climate change, this assumption is violated, yet the structure of the resulting concept drift remains poorly understood. Here we introduce concept drift of simple forecast models as a diagnostic of atmospheric reorganisation. Using ERA5 reanalysis, we quantify drift in spatially explicit linear models of daily mean sea-level pressure and 2\,m temperature. Models are trained on the 1950s and 2000s and evaluated on 2020 tp 2024; their performance difference defines a local, interpretable drift metric. By decomposing errors by frequency band, circulation regime and region, and by mapping drift globally, we show that drift is dominated by low-frequency variability and is strongly regime-dependent. Over the North Atlantic-European sector, low-frequency drift peaks in positive NAO despite a stable large-scale NAO pattern, while Western European summer temperature drift is tightly linked to changes in land-atmosphere coupling rather than mean warming alone. In winter, extreme high-pressure frequencies increase mainly in neutral and negative NAO, whereas structural drift is concentrated in positive NAO and Alpine hotspots. Benchmarking against variance-based diagnostics shows that drift aligns much more with changes in temporal persistence than with changes in volatility or extremes. These findings demonstrate that concept drift can serve as a physically meaningful diagnostic of evolving predictability, revealing aspects of atmospheric reorganisation that are invisible to standard deviation and storm-track metrics.