No, they say end-to-end, meaning they use raw obsevations. Most or all other medium-range models start with ERA5.
There's a paper from Norway that tried end-to-end, but their results were not spectacular. That's the aim of many though, including ECMWF. Note that ECMWF already has their AIFS in production, so AI weather prediction is pretty mainstream nowadays.
Google has a local nowcast model that uses raw observations, in production, but that's a different genre of forecasting than the medium-range models of Aardvark.
> Google has a local nowcast model that uses raw observations, in production, but that's a different genre of forecasting than the medium-range models of Aardvark.
It's very clear from the MetNet announcement blog[1] that they require HRRR or other NWP output at runtime.
There's a paper from Norway that tried end-to-end, but their results were not spectacular. That's the aim of many though, including ECMWF. Note that ECMWF already has their AIFS in production, so AI weather prediction is pretty mainstream nowadays.
Google has a local nowcast model that uses raw observations, in production, but that's a different genre of forecasting than the medium-range models of Aardvark.