Observation-driven correction of numerical weather prediction for marine winds

Abstract

Accurate marine wind forecasts are essential for safe navigation, ship routing, and energy operations, yet they remain challenging because observations over the ocean are sparse, heterogeneous, and temporally variable. We present an observation-informed correction approach for global numerical weather prediction (NWP) of marine winds. Rather than forecasting winds directly, we learn local correction patterns by assimilating the latest in-situ observations to adjust the Global Forecast System (GFS) output. We propose ORCA (Observation-informed Real-time Correction with Attention), a transformer-based deep learning architecture that (i) handles irregular and time-varying observation sets through masking and set-based attention mechanisms, (ii) conditions predictions on recent observation--forecast pairs via cross-attention, and (iii) employs cyclical time embeddings and coordinate-aware location representations to enable single-pass inference at arbitrary spatial coordinates. We evaluate ORCA over the Atlantic Ocean using observations from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) as reference. ORCA reduces GFS 10-meter wind error at all lead times up to 48 hours, achieving 45% improvement at 1-hour lead time and 13% improvement at 48-hour lead time. Spatial analyses reveal the most persistent improvements along coastlines and shipping routes, where observations are most abundant. The tokenized architecture naturally accommodates heterogeneous observing platforms (ships, buoys, tide gauges, and coastal stations) and produces both site-specific predictions and basin-scale gridded products in a single forward pass. These results demonstrate a practical, low-latency post-processing approach that complements NWP by learning to correct systematic forecast errors.