RAINA Project Meeting in Bonn: Looking Back at 2025 and Ahead to 2026

End of November, scientists from Jülich Supercomputing Centre, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the German Weather Service (DWD), and the University of Bonn met at the latter for the annual RAINA project meeting - a look back at 2025 and ahead to 2026. New contacts from VDI/VDE also joined.

RAINA, part of the 4-year EU WeatherGenerator project, advances extreme precipitation and storm forecasting. Highlights from 2025 include:

• Prototyping WeatherGenerator for multi-modal inputs (e.g., IMERG) and testing embedding networks
• Developing test-time adaptation methods
• Integrating datasets and advancing downscaling applications
• Adapting operational verification routines

JSC led the core RAINA development, focusing on evaluation metrics, new loss functions, and a self-supervised learning approach to better capture extremes – addressing previous biases like overestimating weak precipitation and underestimating strong events. University of Bonn contributed models such as MSyncVP, RiverMamba, and test-time adaptation methods. The German Weather Services supported dataset preparation and integration (ICON-DREAM, COSMO-REA2, ICON-D2-EPS).

For 2026, tasks include fine-tuning WeatherGenerator for high-resolution forecasting, improving extreme-event representation, and expanding verification efforts. Exciting times ahead!

More about the end-of-year event: https://raina-project.de/raina-project-meeting-in-bonn-a-look-back-and-forward/