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> Problem is that the WN3 grid is still quite rough (5km) - but a that's a brutal improvement for many places compared to many other global models.

That's a pretty apples-and-oranges comparison. One would almost always use a high-resolution regional model if you needed certain details for different forecasting applications like renewable energy.

It's also worth noting that the 5km outputs are from a model decoder head that was trained against temperature and dewpoint at surface stations. According to the Rasp et al (2026) preprint, this head was designed for continuous sampling; the choice of a 5km grid is arbitrary. What we don't actually know is how well the model handles shocks like a frontal passage or impacts from things like outflow from storms - or even evaporative cooling from precipitation. We are limited to the output that DeepMind publishes; we can't run the model and stress test these things on our own.

That's all a long way to say that the 5km resolution is (a) limited to temperature fields, and (b) we don't know if the "additional" resolution has any impact whatsoever on the phenomena that one would typically use a mesoscale-resolving forecast for.

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You could use this model as another input into the country-scale models.
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This would not likely be a great idea since you reduce your ability to understand inputs except for a few parameters. Explainable inputs become very important for many down the line processes used by government and industry alike, because said inputs and their predictive certainty can be quite informative, even critical, for accurate mesoscale prediction.

If model members were available, with all the usual measures, thats a fantastic place to start looking at serious inclusion. It doesnt seem thats the case, however.

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