Efficient Generative AI Boosts Probabilistic Forecasting of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings
Sudden Stratospheric Warmings (SSWs) are key sources of subseasonal predictability and major drivers of extreme weather in winter. Accurate and efficient probabilistic forecasting of these events remains a persistent challenge for Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems due to computational bottlenecks and limitations in physical representation. While data-driven forecasting is rapidly evolving, its application to the complex, three-dimensional dynamics of SSWs remains underexplored. Here, we bridge this gap by developing a Flow Matching-based generative AI model (FM-Cast) for efficient and skillful probabilistic forecasting of the spatiotemporal evolution of stratospheric circulation in winter. Evaluated across 18 major SSW events (1998-2024), FM-Cast successfully forecasts the onset, intensity, and 3D morphology of the polar vortex up to 15 days in advance for most cases. Notably, it achieves long-range probabilistic forecast skill comparable to or exceeding leading operational NWP systems (ECMWF and CMA) while generating a 30-day forecast with 50-member ensemble, in just two minutes on a consumer GPU. Furthermore, using idealized "perfect troposphere" experiments, we uncover distinct predictability regimes: events driven by continuous wave forcing versus those governed by an initial trigger and subsequent stratospheric dynamical memory. This work establishes a computationally efficient paradigm for probabilistic stratospheric forecasting that simultaneously deepens our physical understanding of atmosphere-climate dynamics.