The DeepRain team has met for its third project meeting at the institute for geosciences at the university of Bonn. Fitting the project’s topic and the season, the rain collector in the backyard of the institute measured 8 mm of rainfall during the 3 days of the meeting
(source: https://www.ifgeo.uni-bonn.de/abteilungen/meteorologie/messdaten/wetterdaten-bonn-endenich/messwerte).
After the first project year, a lot has been accomplished in terms of managing the vast amount of data that are needed in the project, but also with respect to exploring suitable machine learning strategies and statistical methods. The project meeting provided a great opportunity to bring all this information together and discuss the strategy for the coming months. Predicting rainfall is difficult (we knew this from the start), but it is also challenging to understand if and when a rainfall prediction is actually “good” and what this means. Even a simple question like “rain or no rain?” is actually not easy to answer because of measurement and model uncertainties. It will thus require some more time before DeepRain can generate its first meaningful data products.