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Sep 16

CFMW: Cross-modality Fusion Mamba for Robust Object Detection under Adverse Weather

Visible-infrared image pairs provide complementary information, enhancing the reliability and robustness of object detection applications in real-world scenarios. However, most existing methods face challenges in maintaining robustness under complex weather conditions, which limits their applicability. Meanwhile, the reliance on attention mechanisms in modality fusion introduces significant computational complexity and storage overhead, particularly when dealing with high-resolution images. To address these challenges, we propose the Cross-modality Fusion Mamba with Weather-removal (CFMW) to augment stability and cost-effectiveness under adverse weather conditions. Leveraging the proposed Perturbation-Adaptive Diffusion Model (PADM) and Cross-modality Fusion Mamba (CFM) modules, CFMW is able to reconstruct visual features affected by adverse weather, enriching the representation of image details. With efficient architecture design, CFMW is 3 times faster than Transformer-style fusion (e.g., CFT). To bridge the gap in relevant datasets, we construct a new Severe Weather Visible-Infrared (SWVI) dataset, encompassing diverse adverse weather scenarios such as rain, haze, and snow. The dataset contains 64,281 paired visible-infrared images, providing a valuable resource for future research. Extensive experiments on public datasets (i.e., M3FD and LLVIP) and the newly constructed SWVI dataset conclusively demonstrate that CFMW achieves state-of-the-art detection performance. Both the dataset and source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lhy-zjut/CFMW.

zju Zhejiang University
·
Apr 24, 2024

V2X-R: Cooperative LiDAR-4D Radar Fusion for 3D Object Detection with Denoising Diffusion

Current Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) systems have significantly enhanced 3D object detection using LiDAR and camera data. However, these methods suffer from performance degradation in adverse weather conditions. The weather-robust 4D radar provides Doppler and additional geometric information, raising the possibility of addressing this challenge. To this end, we present V2X-R, the first simulated V2X dataset incorporating LiDAR, camera, and 4D radar. V2X-R contains 12,079 scenarios with 37,727 frames of LiDAR and 4D radar point clouds, 150,908 images, and 170,859 annotated 3D vehicle bounding boxes. Subsequently, we propose a novel cooperative LiDAR-4D radar fusion pipeline for 3D object detection and implement it with various fusion strategies. To achieve weather-robust detection, we additionally propose a Multi-modal Denoising Diffusion (MDD) module in our fusion pipeline. MDD utilizes weather-robust 4D radar feature as a condition to prompt the diffusion model to denoise noisy LiDAR features. Experiments show that our LiDAR-4D radar fusion pipeline demonstrates superior performance in the V2X-R dataset. Over and above this, our MDD module further improved the performance of basic fusion model by up to 5.73%/6.70% in foggy/snowy conditions with barely disrupting normal performance. The dataset and code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/ylwhxht/V2X-R.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 13, 2024

OneForecast: A Universal Framework for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting

Accurate weather forecasts are important for disaster prevention, agricultural planning, etc. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods offer physically interpretable high-accuracy predictions but are computationally expensive and fail to fully leverage rapidly growing historical data. In recent years, deep learning models have made significant progress in weather forecasting, but challenges remain, such as balancing global and regional high-resolution forecasts, excessive smoothing in extreme event predictions, and insufficient dynamic system modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global-regional nested weather forecasting framework (OneForecast) based on graph neural networks. By combining a dynamic system perspective with multi-grid theory, we construct a multi-scale graph structure and densify the target region to capture local high-frequency features. We introduce an adaptive messaging mechanism, using dynamic gating units to deeply integrate node and edge features for more accurate extreme event forecasting. For high-resolution regional forecasts, we propose a neural nested grid method to mitigate boundary information loss. Experimental results show that OneForecast performs excellently across global to regional scales and short-term to long-term forecasts, especially in extreme event predictions. Codes link https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/OneForecast.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

Earth System Foundation Model (ESFM): A unified framework for heterogeneous data integration and forecasting

Foundation models (FMs) for the Earth system learn statistical relationships between physical variables across massive datasets to enable versatile downstream applications through finetuning, separating them from task-specific weather models. Here, we introduce Earth System Foundation Model (ESFM), a fully open model building on the 3D Swin UNet backbone of the pioneering Aurora model. ESFM introduces extensions that increase functionality and foster adoption in climate sciences. First, the encoding scheme and training protocols have been extended to handle diverse datasets, including those containing missing values across all spatio-temporal dimensions such as satellite data, as well as station data, all under one backbone. Axial attention is introduced to capture inter-variable dependencies. As a result ESFM skillfully predicts variables in regions or on pressure levels where no data is present at the initial time, while preserving inter-variable relationships, for example between temperature, pressure, and humidity. Individual variable tokenization enables different sets of variables to be shuffled during training and simplifies the process of building extensions for new downstream tasks. Adaptive layer norm-based ensembles allow for a simple yet effective way to transform deterministic ESFM to a probabilistic FM. We present findings using dense gridded data (ERA5, CMIP6), regionally masked dense data, sparse gridded MODIS satellite data, and station data. Results demonstrate competitive or superior performance relative to state-of-the-art benchmarks. Case studies of Super Typhoon Doksuri (2023) and 2024 sudden stratospheric warming events show accurate positional and magnitude estimations of extreme weather. ESFM retains the strengths of previous foundation models, such as long-term stability, but facilitates application to a variety of downstream tasks.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 19

Learning Accurate Storm-Scale Evolution from Observations

Accurate short-term prediction of clouds and precipitation is critical for severe weather warnings, aviation safety, and renewable energy operations. Forecasts at this timescale are provided by numerical weather models and extrapolation methods, both of which have limitations. Mesoscale numerical weather prediction models provide skillful forecasts at these scales but require significant modeling expertise and computational infrastructure, which limits their accessibility. Extrapolation-based methods are computationally lightweight but degrade rapidly beyond 1-2 hours. This presents an opportunity for data-driven forecasting directly from observations using geostationary satellites and ground-based radar, which provide high-frequency, high-resolution observations that capture mesoscale atmospheric evolution. We introduce Stormscope, a family of transformer-based generative diffusion models trained on high-resolution, multi-band geostationary satellite imagery and ground-based weather radar over the continental United States. Stormscope produces forecasts at a temporal resolution of 10 minutes and 6 kilometer spatial resolution, which are competitive with state-of-the-art mesoscale NWP models for lead times up to 6 hours. Its generative architecture enables large ensemble forecasts of explicit mesoscale dynamics for robust uncertainty quantification. Evaluated against extrapolation methods and operational mesoscale NWP models, Stormscope achieves leading performance on standard deterministic and probabilistic verification metrics across forecast horizons from 1 to 6 hours. As Stormscope relies on globally available satellite observations (and radar where available), it offers a pathway to extend skillful mesoscale forecasting to oceanic regions and countries without strong operational mesoscale modeling programs.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 23

Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT)

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) for numerical weather prediction (NWP) have significantly transformed atmospheric modeling. AI NWP models outperform traditional physics-based systems, such as the Integrated Forecast System (IFS), across several global metrics while requiring fewer computational resources. However, existing AI NWP models face limitations related to training datasets and timestep choices, often resulting in artifacts that reduce model performance. To address these challenges, we introduce the Community Research Earth Digital Intelligence Twin (CREDIT) framework, developed at NSF NCAR. CREDIT provides a flexible, scalable, and user-friendly platform for training and deploying AI-based atmospheric models on high-performance computing systems. It offers an end-to-end pipeline for data preprocessing, model training, and evaluation, democratizing access to advanced AI NWP capabilities. We demonstrate CREDIT's potential through WXFormer, a novel deterministic vision transformer designed to predict atmospheric states autoregressively, addressing common AI NWP issues like compounding error growth with techniques such as spectral normalization, padding, and multi-step training. Additionally, to illustrate CREDIT's flexibility and state-of-the-art model comparisons, we train the FUXI architecture within this framework. Our findings show that both FUXI and WXFormer, trained on six-hourly ERA5 hybrid sigma-pressure levels, generally outperform IFS HRES in 10-day forecasts, offering potential improvements in efficiency and forecast accuracy. CREDIT's modular design enables researchers to explore various models, datasets, and training configurations, fostering innovation within the scientific community.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024

AW-MoE: All-Weather Mixture of Experts for Robust Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection

Robust 3D object detection under adverse weather conditions is crucial for autonomous driving. However, most existing methods simply combine all weather samples for training while overlooking data distribution discrepancies across different weather scenarios, leading to performance conflicts. To address this issue, we introduce AW-MoE, the framework that innovatively integrates Mixture of Experts (MoE) into weather-robust multi-modal 3D object detection approaches. AW-MoE incorporates Image-guided Weather-aware Routing (IWR), which leverages the superior discriminability of image features across weather conditions and their invariance to scene variations for precise weather classification. Based on this accurate classification, IWR selects the top-K most relevant Weather-Specific Experts (WSE) that handle data discrepancies, ensuring optimal detection under all weather conditions. Additionally, we propose a Unified Dual-Modal Augmentation (UDMA) for synchronous LiDAR and 4D Radar dual-modal data augmentation while preserving the realism of scenes. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate that AW-MoE achieves ~ 15% improvement in adverse-weather performance over state-of-the-art methods, while incurring negligible inference overhead. Moreover, integrating AW-MoE into established baseline detectors yields performance improvements surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. These results show the effectiveness and strong scalability of our AW-MoE. We will release the code publicly at https://github.com/windlinsherlock/AW-MoE.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 16

Huge Ensembles Part I: Design of Ensemble Weather Forecasts using Spherical Fourier Neural Operators

Studying low-likelihood high-impact extreme weather events in a warming world is a significant and challenging task for current ensemble forecasting systems. While these systems presently use up to 100 members, larger ensembles could enrich the sampling of internal variability. They may capture the long tails associated with climate hazards better than traditional ensemble sizes. Due to computational constraints, it is infeasible to generate huge ensembles (comprised of 1,000-10,000 members) with traditional, physics-based numerical models. In this two-part paper, we replace traditional numerical simulations with machine learning (ML) to generate hindcasts of huge ensembles. In Part I, we construct an ensemble weather forecasting system based on Spherical Fourier Neural Operators (SFNO), and we discuss important design decisions for constructing such an ensemble. The ensemble represents model uncertainty through perturbed-parameter techniques, and it represents initial condition uncertainty through bred vectors, which sample the fastest growing modes of the forecast. Using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) as a baseline, we develop an evaluation pipeline composed of mean, spectral, and extreme diagnostics. Using large-scale, distributed SFNOs with 1.1 billion learned parameters, we achieve calibrated probabilistic forecasts. As the trajectories of the individual members diverge, the ML ensemble mean spectra degrade with lead time, consistent with physical expectations. However, the individual ensemble members' spectra stay constant with lead time. Therefore, these members simulate realistic weather states, and the ML ensemble thus passes a crucial spectral test in the literature. The IFS and ML ensembles have similar Extreme Forecast Indices, and we show that the ML extreme weather forecasts are reliable and discriminating.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024

Deep Learning for Day Forecasts from Sparse Observations

Deep neural networks offer an alternative paradigm for modeling weather conditions. The ability of neural models to make a prediction in less than a second once the data is available and to do so with very high temporal and spatial resolution, and the ability to learn directly from atmospheric observations, are just some of these models' unique advantages. Neural models trained using atmospheric observations, the highest fidelity and lowest latency data, have to date achieved good performance only up to twelve hours of lead time when compared with state-of-the-art probabilistic Numerical Weather Prediction models and only for the sole variable of precipitation. In this paper, we present MetNet-3 that extends significantly both the lead time range and the variables that an observation based neural model can predict well. MetNet-3 learns from both dense and sparse data sensors and makes predictions up to 24 hours ahead for precipitation, wind, temperature and dew point. MetNet-3 introduces a key densification technique that implicitly captures data assimilation and produces spatially dense forecasts in spite of the network training on extremely sparse targets. MetNet-3 has a high temporal and spatial resolution of, respectively, up to 2 minutes and 1 km as well as a low operational latency. We find that MetNet-3 is able to outperform the best single- and multi-member NWPs such as HRRR and ENS over the CONUS region for up to 24 hours ahead setting a new performance milestone for observation based neural models. MetNet-3 is operational and its forecasts are served in Google Search in conjunction with other models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 5, 2023

Video Adverse-Weather-Component Suppression Network via Weather Messenger and Adversarial Backpropagation

Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed to remove adverse weather conditions in single images using a single set of pre-trained weights, they fail to restore weather videos due to the absence of temporal information. Furthermore, existing methods for removing adverse weather conditions (e.g., rain, fog, and snow) from videos can only handle one type of adverse weather. In this work, we propose the first framework for restoring videos from all adverse weather conditions by developing a video adverse-weather-component suppression network (ViWS-Net). To achieve this, we first devise a weather-agnostic video transformer encoder with multiple transformer stages. Moreover, we design a long short-term temporal modeling mechanism for weather messenger to early fuse input adjacent video frames and learn weather-specific information. We further introduce a weather discriminator with gradient reversion, to maintain the weather-invariant common information and suppress the weather-specific information in pixel features, by adversarially predicting weather types. Finally, we develop a messenger-driven video transformer decoder to retrieve the residual weather-specific feature, which is spatiotemporally aggregated with hierarchical pixel features and refined to predict the clean target frame of input videos. Experimental results, on benchmark datasets and real-world weather videos, demonstrate that our ViWS-Net outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in terms of restoring videos degraded by any weather condition.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

WeatherNext 3: Increasing resolution and performance of global weather models with raw observations

State-of-the-art AI weather models have shown impressive medium-range forecast skill and computational efficiency, but suffer two key shortcomings: their forecasts have lower spatial and temporal resolution than the best physics-based models and they are exclusively initialized with and trained on analysis data. As a result, they cannot directly make use of observations, and any biases in the analysis are inherited by the forecast. WeatherNext 3 addresses these shortcomings and establishes a new state-of-the-art for probabilistic medium-range forecasting skill. First, WeatherNext 3 generates new forecasts every hour (rather than every 6 hours like traditional global models) by ingesting low-latency geostationary satellite data. Second, WeatherNext 3's temporal and spatial resolution are on par with physics-based global models, with hourly time steps and 0.1 degree resolution for single-level variables, including solar radiation and cloud cover. Third, WeatherNext 3 moves beyond traditional analysis variables by learning to predict satellite-derived precipitation estimates, as well as tropical cyclone and station observations. Modelling sparse station data allows WeatherNext 3 to make 2m temperature and dewpoint predictions at any location and time, conditioned on local geographical features, with substantially lower error than competing global models, even when evaluated against unseen stations. Together, WeatherNext 3's capabilities move operational AI-based weather forecasting beyond emulating the traditionally distinct stages of data assimilation, forecasting and post-processing, which helps to further push the frontier of performance and granularity for global weather prediction.

  • 25 authors
·
Sep 2

Using Machine Learning to Calibrate Storm-Scale Probabilistic Guidance of Severe Weather Hazards in the Warn-on-Forecast System

A primary goal of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Warn-on-Forecast (WoF) project is to provide rapidly updating probabilistic guidance to human forecasters for short-term (e.g., 0-3 h) severe weather forecasts. Maximizing the usefulness of probabilistic severe weather guidance from an ensemble of convection-allowing model forecasts requires calibration. In this study, we compare the skill of a simple method using updraft helicity against a series of machine learning (ML) algorithms for calibrating WoFS severe weather guidance. ML models are often used to calibrate severe weather guidance since they leverage multiple variables and discover useful patterns in complex datasets. \indent Our dataset includes WoF System (WoFS) ensemble forecasts available every 5 minutes out to 150 min of lead time from the 2017-2019 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiments (81 dates). Using a novel ensemble storm track identification method, we extracted three sets of predictors from the WoFS forecasts: intra-storm state variables, near-storm environment variables, and morphological attributes of the ensemble storm tracks. We then trained random forests, gradient-boosted trees, and logistic regression algorithms to predict which WoFS 30-min ensemble storm tracks will correspond to a tornado, severe hail, and/or severe wind report. For the simple method, we extracted the ensemble probability of 2-5 km updraft helicity (UH) exceeding a threshold (tuned per severe weather hazard) from each ensemble storm track. The three ML algorithms discriminated well for all three hazards and produced more reliable probabilities than the UH-based predictions. Overall, the results suggest that ML-based calibrations of dynamical ensemble output can improve short term, storm-scale severe weather probabilistic guidance

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 11, 2020

FengWu: Pushing the Skillful Global Medium-range Weather Forecast beyond 10 Days Lead

We present FengWu, an advanced data-driven global medium-range weather forecast system based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Different from existing data-driven weather forecast methods, FengWu solves the medium-range forecast problem from a multi-modal and multi-task perspective. Specifically, a deep learning architecture equipped with model-specific encoder-decoders and cross-modal fusion Transformer is elaborately designed, which is learned under the supervision of an uncertainty loss to balance the optimization of different predictors in a region-adaptive manner. Besides this, a replay buffer mechanism is introduced to improve medium-range forecast performance. With 39-year data training based on the ERA5 reanalysis, FengWu is able to accurately reproduce the atmospheric dynamics and predict the future land and atmosphere states at 37 vertical levels on a 0.25° latitude-longitude resolution. Hindcasts of 6-hourly weather in 2018 based on ERA5 demonstrate that FengWu performs better than GraphCast in predicting 80\% of the 880 reported predictands, e.g., reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) of 10-day lead global z500 prediction from 733 to 651 m^{2}/s^2. In addition, the inference cost of each iteration is merely 600ms on NVIDIA Tesla A100 hardware. The results suggest that FengWu can significantly improve the forecast skill and extend the skillful global medium-range weather forecast out to 10.75 days lead (with ACC of z500 > 0.6) for the first time.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 5, 2023

Aardvark weather: end-to-end data-driven weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is critical for a range of human activities including transportation, agriculture, industry, as well as the safety of the general public. Machine learning models have the potential to transform the complex weather prediction pipeline, but current approaches still rely on numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems, limiting forecast speed and accuracy. Here we demonstrate that a machine learning model can replace the entire operational NWP pipeline. Aardvark Weather, an end-to-end data-driven weather prediction system, ingests raw observations and outputs global gridded forecasts and local station forecasts. Further, it can be optimised end-to-end to maximise performance over quantities of interest. Global forecasts outperform an operational NWP baseline for multiple variables and lead times. Local station forecasts are skillful up to ten days lead time and achieve comparable and often lower errors than a post-processed global NWP baseline and a state-of-the-art end-to-end forecasting system with input from human forecasters. These forecasts are produced with a remarkably simple neural process model using just 8% of the input data and three orders of magnitude less compute than existing NWP and hybrid AI-NWP methods. We anticipate that Aardvark Weather will be the starting point for a new generation of end-to-end machine learning models for medium-range forecasting that will reduce computational costs by orders of magnitude and enable the rapid and cheap creation of bespoke models for users in a variety of fields, including for the developing world where state-of-the-art local models are not currently available.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 30, 2024

Uncertainty-Aware End-to-End AI Weather Forecasting: Disentangling Observation and Model Contributions

End-to-end weather forecasting systems produce skillful global gridded and station forecasts directly from raw Earth observations, replacing the numerical weather prediction pipeline, including data assimilation, at a fraction of its cost. These systems are deterministic and issue no uncertainty. Here we render the Aardvark Weather model probabilistic by attaching one stochastic mechanism to each component: learned, input-dependent noise at the observation encoder, capturing aleatoric uncertainty inherited from the observing system, and Monte Carlo dropout in the processor, capturing epistemic uncertainty in the learned dynamics. The resulting nested ensemble attributes forecast spread to the two sources through a law-of-total-variance decomposition, cross-checked by withholding observation streams. Probabilistic finetuning significantly improves the mean forecast, by 4.2% on average across variables and lead times. The ensemble is calibrated against ERA5 through the medium range (spread-skill ratio 0.98), keeps station RMSE within 2.4% of the deterministic model while beating it in CRPS at every lead time, and trails the operational ECMWF ensemble. The encoder branch behaves as observation-driven uncertainty. Component-attributed uncertainty makes end-to-end forecasts more transparent, a step toward observation-driven digital twins of the atmosphere.

Deep Learning and Foundation Models for Weather Prediction: A Survey

Physics-based numerical models have been the bedrock of atmospheric sciences for decades, offering robust solutions but often at the cost of significant computational resources. Deep learning (DL) models have emerged as powerful tools in meteorology, capable of analyzing complex weather and climate data by learning intricate dependencies and providing rapid predictions once trained. While these models demonstrate promising performance in weather prediction, often surpassing traditional physics-based methods, they still face critical challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent deep learning and foundation models for weather prediction. We propose a taxonomy to classify existing models based on their training paradigms: deterministic predictive learning, probabilistic generative learning, and pre-training and fine-tuning. For each paradigm, we delve into the underlying model architectures, address major challenges, offer key insights, and propose targeted directions for future research. Furthermore, we explore real-world applications of these methods and provide a curated summary of open-source code repositories and widely used datasets, aiming to bridge research advancements with practical implementations while fostering open and trustworthy scientific practices in adopting cutting-edge artificial intelligence for weather prediction. The related sources are available at https://github.com/JimengShi/ DL-Foundation-Models-Weather.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 12, 2025

Kilometer-Scale Convection Allowing Model Emulation using Generative Diffusion Modeling

Storm-scale convection-allowing models (CAMs) are an important tool for predicting the evolution of thunderstorms and mesoscale convective systems that result in damaging extreme weather. By explicitly resolving convective dynamics within the atmosphere they afford meteorologists the nuance needed to provide outlook on hazard. Deep learning models have thus far not proven skilful at km-scale atmospheric simulation, despite being competitive at coarser resolution with state-of-the-art global, medium-range weather forecasting. We present a generative diffusion model called StormCast, which emulates the high-resolution rapid refresh (HRRR) model-NOAA's state-of-the-art 3km operational CAM. StormCast autoregressively predicts 99 state variables at km scale using a 1-hour time step, with dense vertical resolution in the atmospheric boundary layer, conditioned on 26 synoptic variables. We present evidence of successfully learnt km-scale dynamics including competitive 1-6 hour forecast skill for composite radar reflectivity alongside physically realistic convective cluster evolution, moist updrafts, and cold pool morphology. StormCast predictions maintain realistic power spectra for multiple predicted variables across multi-hour forecasts. Together, these results establish the potential for autoregressive ML to emulate CAMs -- opening up new km-scale frontiers for regional ML weather prediction and future climate hazard dynamical downscaling.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 20, 2024

Zephyrus: An Agentic Framework for Weather Science

Foundation models for weather science are pre-trained on vast amounts of structured numerical data and outperform traditional weather forecasting systems. However, these models lack language-based reasoning capabilities, limiting their utility in interactive scientific workflows. Large language models (LLMs) excel at understanding and generating text but cannot reason about high-dimensional meteorological datasets. We bridge this gap by building the first agentic framework for weather science. Our framework includes a Python code-based environment for agents (ZephyrusWorld) to interact with weather data, featuring tools including a WeatherBench 2 dataset indexer, geolocator for geocoding from natural language, weather forecasting, climate simulation capabilities, and a climatology module for querying precomputed climatological statistics (e.g., means, extremes, and quantiles) across multiple timescales. We design Zephyrus, a multi-turn LLM-based weather agent that iteratively analyzes weather datasets, observes results, and refines its approach through conversational feedback loops. We accompany the agent with a new benchmark, ZephyrusBench, with a scalable data generation pipeline that constructs diverse question-answer pairs across weather-related tasks, from basic lookups to advanced forecasting, extreme event detection, and counterfactual reasoning. Experiments on this benchmark demonstrate the strong performance of Zephyrus agents over text-only baselines, outperforming them by up to 44 percentage points in correctness. However, the hard tasks are still difficult even with frontier LLMs, highlighting the challenging nature of our benchmark and suggesting room for future development. Our codebase and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Rose-STL-Lab/Zephyrus.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 4, 2025

An idealized physical model for the severe convective storm environmental sounding

This work develops a theoretical model for steady thermodynamic and kinematic profiles for severe convective storm environments, building off of the two-layer static energy framework developed in Agard and Emanuel (2017). The model is phrased in terms of static energy, and it allows for independent variation of the boundary layer and free troposphere separated by a capping inversion. An algorithm is presented to apply the model to generate a sounding for numerical simulations of severe convective storms, and the model is compared and contrasted with that of Weisman and Klemp. The model is then fit to a case-study sounding associated with the 3 May 1999 tornado outbreak, and its potential utility is demonstrated via idealized numerical simulation experiments. A long-lived supercell is successfully simulated with the historical sounding but not the analogous theoretical sounding. Two types of example experiments are then performed that do simulate a long-lived supercell: 1) a semi-theoretical experiment in which a portion of the theoretical sounding is modified to match the real sounding (low-level moisture); 2) a fully-theoretical experiment in which a model physical parameter is modified (free-tropospheric relative humidity). Overall, the construction of this minimal model is flexible and amenable to additional modifications as needed. The model offers a novel framework that may be useful for testing how severe convective storms depend on the vertical structure of the hydrostatic environment, as well as for linking variability in these environments to the physical processes that produce them within the climate system.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 27, 2020

Forecasting the Ionosphere from Sparse GNSS Data with Temporal-Fusion Transformers

The ionosphere critically influences Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), satellite communications, and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) operations, yet accurate prediction of its variability remains challenging due to nonlinear couplings between solar, geomagnetic, and thermospheric drivers. Total Electron Content (TEC), a key ionospheric parameter, is derived from GNSS observations, but its reliable forecasting is limited by the sparse nature of global measurements and the limited accuracy of empirical models, especially during strong space weather conditions. In this work, we present a machine learning framework for ionospheric TEC forecasting that leverages Temporal Fusion Transformers (TFT) to predict sparse ionosphere data. Our approach accommodates heterogeneous input sources, including solar irradiance, geomagnetic indices, and GNSS-derived vertical TEC, and applies preprocessing and temporal alignment strategies. Experiments spanning 2010-2025 demonstrate that the model achieves robust predictions up to 24 hours ahead, with root mean square errors as low as 3.33 TECU. Results highlight that solar EUV irradiance provides the strongest predictive signals. Beyond forecasting accuracy, the framework offers interpretability through attention-based analysis, supporting both operational applications and scientific discovery. To encourage reproducibility and community-driven development, we release the full implementation as the open-source toolkit ionopy.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 30, 2025

WeatherQA: Can Multimodal Language Models Reason about Severe Weather?

Severe convective weather events, such as hail, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, often occur quickly yet cause significant damage, costing billions of dollars every year. This highlights the importance of forecasting severe weather threats hours in advance to better prepare meteorologists and residents in at-risk areas. Can modern large foundation models perform such forecasting? Existing weather benchmarks typically focus only on predicting time-series changes in certain weather parameters (e.g., temperature, moisture) with text-only features. In this work, we introduce WeatherQA, the first multimodal dataset designed for machines to reason about complex combinations of weather parameters (a.k.a., ingredients) and predict severe weather in real-world scenarios. The dataset includes over 8,000 (multi-images, text) pairs for diverse severe weather events. Each pair contains rich information crucial for forecasting -- the images describe the ingredients capturing environmental instability, surface observations, and radar reflectivity, and the text contains forecast analyses written by human experts. With WeatherQA, we evaluate state-of-the-art vision language models, including GPT4, Claude3.5, Gemini-1.5, and a fine-tuned Llama3-based VLM, by designing two challenging tasks: (1) multi-choice QA for predicting affected area and (2) classification of the development potential of severe convection. These tasks require deep understanding of domain knowledge (e.g., atmospheric dynamics) and complex reasoning over multimodal data (e.g., interactions between weather parameters). We show a substantial gap between the strongest VLM, GPT4o, and human reasoning. Our comprehensive case study with meteorologists further reveals the weaknesses of the models, suggesting that better training and data integration are necessary to bridge this gap. WeatherQA link: https://github.com/chengqianma/WeatherQA.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 17

AIFS-SUBS: Extending Data-Driven Forecasting to Sub-Seasonal Timescales

Data-driven models now rival numerical weather prediction in the medium range, but extending them to sub-seasonal lead times raises challenges absent at shorter horizons. Errors accumulate over long autoregressive rollouts, systematic biases grow with lead time, and several years of data must be held out for independent verification, even though machine-learning models otherwise benefit from longer training records. To address these challenges, we adapt ECMWF's AIFS-CRPS medium-range model. AIFS-SUBS adopts a 24h autoregressive time step to reduce error accumulation, adds stratospheric levels and top-of-atmosphere thermal radiation as predictors, and reserves 2007--2011 as an independent verification window. We evaluate two config-durations: AIFS-SUBS, fine-tuned on operational analyses, and AIFS-SUBS-ERA5, trained on ERA5 alone. Across weeks 2--6, AIFS-SUBS matches the operational Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) in probabilistic skill while reducing systematic biases. For the convective (OLR) component of the Madden--Julian Oscillation (MJO), AIFS-SUBS extends skilful forecasts (correlation > 0.5) by eight days relative to the IFS, while matching or exceeding the IFS for the full multivariate RMM index. AIFS-SUBS also reproduces the observed MJO modulation of tropical cyclone activity comparably. Stratospheric skill is particularly strong with AIFS-SUBS reproducing sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) frequency and surface impact. In the AI Weather Quest, AIFS-SUBS-ERA5 attains a variable-averaged ranked probability skill score slightly ahead of the IFS at weeks 3 and 4. At inference, AIFS-SUBS uses about 200 times less energy than the IFS, opening the door to much larger real-time ensembles. AIFS-SUBS is ECMWF's first machine-learning model targeted at sub-seasonal time-scales.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 5

FuXi-RTM: A Physics-Guided Prediction Framework with Radiative Transfer Modeling

Similar to conventional video generation, current deep learning-based weather prediction frameworks often lack explicit physical constraints, leading to unphysical outputs that limit their reliability for operational forecasting. Among various physical processes requiring proper representation, radiation plays a fundamental role as it drives Earth's weather and climate systems. However, accurate simulation of radiative transfer processes remains challenging for traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models due to their inherent complexity and high computational costs. Here, we propose FuXi-RTM, a hybrid physics-guided deep learning framework designed to enhance weather forecast accuracy while enforcing physical consistency. FuXi-RTM integrates a primary forecasting model (FuXi) with a fixed deep learning-based radiative transfer model (DLRTM) surrogate that efficiently replaces conventional radiation parameterization schemes. This represents the first deep learning-based weather forecasting framework to explicitly incorporate physical process modeling. Evaluated over a comprehensive 5-year dataset, FuXi-RTM outperforms its unconstrained counterpart in 88.51% of 3320 variable and lead time combinations, with improvements in radiative flux predictions. By incorporating additional physical processes, FuXi-RTM paves the way for next-generation weather forecasting systems that are both accurate and physically consistent.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025

On the Predictive Skill of Artificial Intelligence-based Weather Models for Extreme Events using Uncertainty Quantification

Accurate prediction of extreme weather events remains a major challenge for artificial intelligence-based weather prediction systems. While deterministic models such as FuXi, GraphCast, and SFNO have achieved competitive forecast skill relative to numerical weather prediction, their ability to represent uncertainty and capture extremes is still limited. This study investigates how state-of-the-art deterministic artificial intelligence-based models respond to initial-condition perturbations and evaluates the resulting ensembles in forecasting extremes. Using four perturbation strategies (Gaussian, Perlin noise, Hemispheric Centered Bred Vectors, and Huge Ensembles), we generate 50 member ensembles for the August 2022 Pakistan floods and China heatwave, and complement these case studies with a global threshold-based evaluation. Ensemble skill is assessed against ERA5 and compared with IFS ENS and the AIFS ENS probabilistic model using deterministic and probabilistic metrics. Results show that simpler perturbations like Gaussian and Perlin noise produce similarly realistic ensemble spread and probabilistic skill as flow-based approaches like HCBV and HENS, narrowing but not closing the performance gap with numerical weather prediction ensembles, or native probabilistic models which retain the highest probabilistic skill across variables. Model choice is the dominant factor for ensemble performance, not perturbation method. Across variables, models capture temperature extremes more effectively than precipitation. These findings demonstrate that simple input perturbations can extend deterministic models toward probabilistic forecasting in hardware-constrained settings, supporting artificial intelligence-driven early warning systems.

Scaling transformer neural networks for skillful and reliable medium-range weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is a fundamental problem for anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Recently, data-driven approaches for weather forecasting based on deep learning have shown great promise, achieving accuracies that are competitive with operational systems. However, those methods often employ complex, customized architectures without sufficient ablation analysis, making it difficult to understand what truly contributes to their success. Here we introduce Stormer, a simple transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on weather forecasting with minimal changes to the standard transformer backbone. We identify the key components of Stormer through careful empirical analyses, including weather-specific embedding, randomized dynamics forecast, and pressure-weighted loss. At the core of Stormer is a randomized forecasting objective that trains the model to forecast the weather dynamics over varying time intervals. During inference, this allows us to produce multiple forecasts for a target lead time and combine them to obtain better forecast accuracy. On WeatherBench 2, Stormer performs competitively at short to medium-range forecasts and outperforms current methods beyond 7 days, while requiring orders-of-magnitude less training data and compute. Additionally, we demonstrate Stormer's favorable scaling properties, showing consistent improvements in forecast accuracy with increases in model size and training tokens. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/tung-nd/stormer.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

FuXi-2.0: Advancing machine learning weather forecasting model for practical applications

Machine learning (ML) models have become increasingly valuable in weather forecasting, providing forecasts that not only lower computational costs but often match or exceed the accuracy of traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Despite their potential, ML models typically suffer from limitations such as coarse temporal resolution, typically 6 hours, and a limited set of meteorological variables, limiting their practical applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce FuXi-2.0, an advanced ML model that delivers 1-hourly global weather forecasts and includes a comprehensive set of essential meteorological variables, thereby expanding its utility across various sectors like wind and solar energy, aviation, and marine shipping. Our study conducts comparative analyses between ML-based 1-hourly forecasts and those from the high-resolution forecast (HRES) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for various practical scenarios. The results demonstrate that FuXi-2.0 consistently outperforms ECMWF HRES in forecasting key meteorological variables relevant to these sectors. In particular, FuXi-2.0 shows superior performance in wind power forecasting compared to ECMWF HRES, further validating its efficacy as a reliable tool for scenarios demanding precise weather forecasts. Additionally, FuXi-2.0 also integrates both atmospheric and oceanic components, representing a significant step forward in the development of coupled atmospheric-ocean models. Further comparative analyses reveal that FuXi-2.0 provides more accurate forecasts of tropical cyclone intensity than its predecessor, FuXi-1.0, suggesting that there are benefits of an atmosphere-ocean coupled model over atmosphere-only models.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 10, 2024

Advancing Parsimonious Deep Learning Weather Prediction using the HEALPix Mesh

We present a parsimonious deep learning weather prediction model to forecast seven atmospheric variables with 3-h time resolution for up to one-year lead times on a 110-km global mesh using the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix). In comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) machine learning (ML) weather forecast models, such as Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, our DLWP-HPX model uses coarser resolution and far fewer prognostic variables. Yet, at one-week lead times, its skill is only about one day behind both SOTA ML forecast models and the SOTA numerical weather prediction model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. We report several improvements in model design, including switching from the cubed sphere to the HEALPix mesh, inverting the channel depth of the U-Net, and introducing gated recurrent units (GRU) on each level of the U-Net hierarchy. The consistent east-west orientation of all cells on the HEALPix mesh facilitates the development of location-invariant convolution kernels that successfully propagate weather patterns across the globe without requiring separate kernels for the polar and equatorial faces of the cube sphere. Without any loss of spectral power after the first two days, the model can be unrolled autoregressively for hundreds of steps into the future to generate realistic states of the atmosphere that respect seasonal trends, as showcased in one-year simulations.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 11, 2023

Enhancing LLMs for Power System Simulations: A Feedback-driven Multi-agent Framework

The integration of experimental technologies with large language models (LLMs) is transforming scientific research. It positions AI as a versatile research assistant rather than a mere problem-solving tool. In the field of power systems, however, managing simulations -- one of the essential experimental technologies -- remains a challenge for LLMs due to their limited domain-specific knowledge, restricted reasoning capabilities, and imprecise handling of simulation parameters. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a feedback-driven, multi-agent framework. It incorporates three proposed modules: an enhanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module, an improved reasoning module, and a dynamic environmental acting module with an error-feedback mechanism. Validated on 69 diverse tasks from Daline and MATPOWER, this framework achieves success rates of 93.13% and 96.85%, respectively. It significantly outperforms ChatGPT 4o, o1-preview, and the fine-tuned GPT-4o, which all achieved a success rate lower than 30% on complex tasks. Additionally, the proposed framework also supports rapid, cost-effective task execution, completing each simulation in approximately 30 seconds at an average cost of 0.014 USD for tokens. Overall, this adaptable framework lays a foundation for developing intelligent LLM-based assistants for human researchers, facilitating power system research and beyond.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 21, 2024

HealDA: Highlighting the importance of initial errors in end-to-end AI weather forecasts

AI weather models now rival leading numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems in medium-range skill. However, almost all still rely on NWP data assimilation (DA) to provide initial conditions, tying them to expensive infrastructure and limiting the practical speed and accuracy gains of ML. More recently, ML-based DA systems have been proposed, which are often trained and evaluated end-to-end with a forecast model, making it difficult to assess the quality of their analysis fields. We introduce HealDA, a global ML-based DA system that maps a short window of satellite and conventional observations directly to a 1° atmospheric state on the HEALPix grid, using a smaller sensor suite than operational NWP and no background forecast at runtime. We treat HealDA strictly as a DA module: its analyses are used to initialize off-the-shelf ML forecast models without any fine-tuning of either. For a variety of off-the-shelf ML forecast models, including FourCastNet3 (FCN3), Aurora, and FengWu, HealDA-initialized forecasts lose less than one day of effective lead time when scored against ERA5. HealDA-initialized FCN3 ensembles similarly trail those of the ECMWF IFS ENS system by < 24 h. We find that forecast error growth in these models i unchanged from HealDA initialization, and the skill gap primarily arises from the larger initial error of the HealDA analysis. Spectral analysis reveals that this stems from overfitting to the large scales and upper-tropospheric fields. We also demonstrate that small changes in the verification setup can shift apparent skill by 12--24h, underscoring the need for consistent scoring. Taken together, these results clarify the current performance of ML-based DA systems and show that a relatively simple, background-free network can already provide initial conditions that are usable by state-of-the-art ML forecast models with only modest loss in medium-range skill.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 24

Huge Ensembles Part II: Properties of a Huge Ensemble of Hindcasts Generated with Spherical Fourier Neural Operators

In Part I, we created an ensemble based on Spherical Fourier Neural Operators. As initial condition perturbations, we used bred vectors, and as model perturbations, we used multiple checkpoints trained independently from scratch. Based on diagnostics that assess the ensemble's physical fidelity, our ensemble has comparable performance to operational weather forecasting systems. However, it requires orders of magnitude fewer computational resources. Here in Part II, we generate a huge ensemble (HENS), with 7,424 members initialized each day of summer 2023. We enumerate the technical requirements for running huge ensembles at this scale. HENS precisely samples the tails of the forecast distribution and presents a detailed sampling of internal variability. HENS has two primary applications: (1) as a large dataset with which to study the statistics and drivers of extreme weather and (2) as a weather forecasting system. For extreme climate statistics, HENS samples events 4sigma away from the ensemble mean. At each grid cell, HENS increases the skill of the most accurate ensemble member and enhances coverage of possible future trajectories. As a weather forecasting model, HENS issues extreme weather forecasts with better uncertainty quantification. It also reduces the probability of outlier events, in which the verification value lies outside the ensemble forecast distribution.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 2, 2024

Connecting the Dots: A Machine Learning Ready Dataset for Ionospheric Forecasting Models

Operational forecasting of the ionosphere remains a critical space weather challenge due to sparse observations, complex coupling across geospatial layers, and a growing need for timely, accurate predictions that support Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), communications, aviation safety, as well as satellite operations. As part of the 2025 NASA Heliolab, we present a curated, open-access dataset that integrates diverse ionospheric and heliospheric measurements into a coherent, machine learning-ready structure, designed specifically to support next-generation forecasting models and address gaps in current operational frameworks. Our workflow integrates a large selection of data sources comprising Solar Dynamic Observatory data, solar irradiance indices (F10.7), solar wind parameters (velocity and interplanetary magnetic field), geomagnetic activity indices (Kp, AE, SYM-H), and NASA JPL's Global Ionospheric Maps of Total Electron Content (GIM-TEC). We also implement geospatially sparse data such as the TEC derived from the World-Wide GNSS Receiver Network and crowdsourced Android smartphone measurements. This novel heterogeneous dataset is temporally and spatially aligned into a single, modular data structure that supports both physical and data-driven modeling. Leveraging this dataset, we train and benchmark several spatiotemporal machine learning architectures for forecasting vertical TEC under both quiet and geomagnetically active conditions. This work presents an extensive dataset and modeling pipeline that enables exploration of not only ionospheric dynamics but also broader Sun-Earth interactions, supporting both scientific inquiry and operational forecasting efforts.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025

FuXi Weather: A data-to-forecast machine learning system for global weather

Weather forecasting traditionally relies on numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems that integrates global observational systems, data assimilation (DA), and forecasting models. Despite steady improvements in forecast accuracy over recent decades, further advances are increasingly constrained by high computational costs, the underutilization of vast observational datasets, and the challenges of obtaining finer resolution. These limitations, alongside the uneven distribution of observational networks, result in global disparities in forecast accuracy, leaving some regions vulnerable to extreme weather. Recent advances in machine learning present a promising alternative, providing more efficient and accurate forecasts using the same initial conditions as NWP. However, current machine learning models still depend on the initial conditions generated by NWP systems, which require extensive computational resources and expertise. Here we introduce FuXi Weather, a machine learning weather forecasting system that assimilates data from multiple satellites. Operating on a 6-hourly DA and forecast cycle, FuXi Weather generates reliable and accurate 10-day global weather forecasts at a spatial resolution of 0.25^circ. FuXi Weather is the first system to achieve all-grid, all-surface, all-channel, and all-sky DA and forecasting, extending skillful forecast lead times beyond those of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) high-resolution forecasts (HRES) while using significantly fewer observations. FuXi Weather consistently outperforms ECMWF HRES in observation-sparse regions, such as central Africa, demonstrating its potential to improve forecasts where observational infrastructure is limited.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 10, 2024

HiRO-ACE: Fast and skillful AI emulation and downscaling trained on a 3 km global storm-resolving model

Kilometer-scale simulations of the atmosphere are an important tool for assessing local weather extremes and climate impacts, but computational expense limits their use to small regions, short periods, and limited ensembles. Machine learning offers a pathway to efficiently emulate these high-resolution simulations. Here we introduce HiRO-ACE, a two-stage AI modeling framework combining a stochastic version of the Ai2 Climate Emulator (ACE2S) with diffusion-based downscaling (HiRO) to generate 3 km precipitation fields over arbitrary regions of the globe. Both components are trained on data derived from a decade of atmospheric simulation by X-SHiELD, a 3 km global storm-resolving model. HiRO performs a 32x downscaling--generating 3 km 6-hourly precipitation from coarse 100 km inputs by training on paired high-resolution and coarsened X-SHiELD outputs. ACE2S is a 1^circ times 1^circ (sim100 km) stochastic autoregressive global atmosphere emulator that maintains grid-scale precipitation variability consistent with coarsened X-SHiELD, enabling its outputs to be ingested by HiRO without additional tuning. HiRO-ACE reproduces the distribution of extreme precipitation rates through the 99.99th percentile, with time-mean precipitation biases below 10% almost everywhere. The framework generates plausible tropical cyclones, fronts, and convective events from poorly resolved coarse inputs. Its computational efficiency allows generation of 6-hourly high-resolution regional precipitation for decades of simulated climate within a single day using one H100 GPU, while the probabilistic design enables ensemble generation for quantifying uncertainty. This establishes an AI-enabled pathway for affordably leveraging the realism of expensive km-scale simulations to support local climate adaptation planning and extreme event risk assessment.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 20, 2025

WeatherEdit: Controllable Weather Editing with 4D Gaussian Field

In this work, we present WeatherEdit, a novel weather editing pipeline for generating realistic weather effects with controllable types and severity in 3D scenes. Our approach is structured into two key components: weather background editing and weather particle construction. For weather background editing, we introduce an all-in-one adapter that integrates multiple weather styles into a single pretrained diffusion model, enabling the generation of diverse weather effects in 2D image backgrounds. During inference, we design a Temporal-View (TV-) attention mechanism that follows a specific order to aggregate temporal and spatial information, ensuring consistent editing across multi-frame and multi-view images. To construct the weather particles, we first reconstruct a 3D scene using the edited images and then introduce a dynamic 4D Gaussian field to generate snowflakes, raindrops and fog in the scene. The attributes and dynamics of these particles are precisely controlled through physical-based modelling and simulation, ensuring realistic weather representation and flexible severity adjustments. Finally, we integrate the 4D Gaussian field with the 3D scene to render consistent and highly realistic weather effects. Experiments on multiple driving datasets demonstrate that WeatherEdit can generate diverse weather effects with controllable condition severity, highlighting its potential for autonomous driving simulation in adverse weather. See project page: https://jumponthemoon.github.io/w-edit

  • 4 authors
·
May 26, 2025

Vision-Language Models Meet Meteorology: Developing Models for Extreme Weather Events Detection with Heatmaps

Real-time detection and prediction of extreme weather protect human lives and infrastructure. Traditional methods rely on numerical threshold setting and manual interpretation of weather heatmaps with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can be slow and error-prone. Our research redefines Extreme Weather Events Detection (EWED) by framing it as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, thereby introducing a more precise and automated solution. Leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLM) to simultaneously process visual and textual data, we offer an effective aid to enhance the analysis process of weather heatmaps. Our initial assessment of general-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4-Vision) on EWED revealed poor performance, characterized by low accuracy and frequent hallucinations due to inadequate color differentiation and insufficient meteorological knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce ClimateIQA, the first meteorological VQA dataset, which includes 8,760 wind gust heatmaps and 254,040 question-answer pairs covering four question types, both generated from the latest climate reanalysis data. We also propose Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), an innovative technique that leverages OpenCV and K-Means clustering to capture and depict color contours in heatmaps, providing ClimateIQA with more accurate color spatial location information. Finally, we present Climate-Zoo, the first meteorological VLM collection, which adapts VLMs to meteorological applications using the ClimateIQA dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that models from Climate-Zoo substantially outperform state-of-the-art general VLMs, achieving an accuracy increase from 0% to over 90% in EWED verification. The datasets and models in this study are publicly available for future climate science research: https://github.com/AlexJJJChen/Climate-Zoo.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024

FuXi-ENS: A machine learning model for medium-range ensemble weather forecasting

Ensemble forecasting is crucial for improving weather predictions, especially for forecasts of extreme events. Constructing an ensemble prediction system (EPS) based on conventional NWP models is highly computationally expensive. ML models have emerged as valuable tools for deterministic weather forecasts, providing forecasts with significantly reduced computational requirements and even surpassing the forecast performance of traditional NWP models. However, challenges arise when applying ML models to ensemble forecasting. Recent ML models, such as GenCast and SEEDS model, rely on the ERA5 EDA or operational NWP ensemble members for forecast generation. Their spatial resolution is also considered too coarse for many applications. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FuXi-ENS, an advanced ML model designed to deliver 6-hourly global ensemble weather forecasts up to 15 days. This model runs at a significantly increased spatial resolution of 0.25\textdegree, incorporating 5 atmospheric variables at 13 pressure levels, along with 13 surface variables. By leveraging the inherent probabilistic nature of Variational AutoEncoder (VAE), FuXi-ENS optimizes a loss function that combines the CRPS and the KL divergence between the predicted and target distribution, facilitating the incorporation of flow-dependent perturbations in both initial conditions and forecast. This innovative approach makes FuXi-ENS an advancement over the traditional ones that use L1 loss combined with the KL loss in standard VAE models for ensemble weather forecasting. Results demonstrate that FuXi-ENS outperforms ensemble forecasts from the ECMWF, a world leading NWP model, in the CRPS of 98.1% of 360 variable and forecast lead time combinations. This achievement underscores the potential of the FuXi-ENS model to enhance ensemble weather forecasts, offering a promising direction for further development in this field.

  • 10 authors
·
May 9, 2024

Operational Solar Flare Forecasting System Using an Explainable Large Language Model

This study focuses on forecasting major (>=M-class) solar flares that can severely impact the near-Earth environment. We construct two types of datasets using the Space Weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARP), and develop a flare prediction network based on large language model (LLMFlareNet). We apply SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to explain the model predictions. We develop an operational forecasting system based on the LLMFlareNet model. We adopt a daily mode for performance comparison across various operational forecasting systems under identical active region (AR) number and prediction date, using daily operational observational data. The main results are as follows. (1) Through ablation experiments and comparison with baseline models, LLMFlareNet achieves the best TSS scores of 0.720 +/- 0.040 on the ten cross-validation (CV) dataset with mixed ARs. (2) By both global and local SHAP analyses, we identify that R_VALUE is the most influential physical feature for the prediction of LLMFlareNet, aligning with flare magnetic reconnection theory. (3) In daily mode, LLMFlareNet achieves TSS scores of 0.680/0.571 (0.689/0.661, respectively) on the dataset with single/mixed ARs, markedly outperforming NASA/CCMC (SolarFlareNet, respectively). This work introduces the first application of a large language model as a universal computation engine with explainability method in this domain, and presents the first comparison between operational flare forecasting systems in daily mode. The proposed LLMFlareNet-based system demonstrates substantial improvements over existing systems.

  • 17 authors
·
Jan 30

Neural General Circulation Models for Weather and Climate

General circulation models (GCMs) are the foundation of weather and climate prediction. GCMs are physics-based simulators which combine a numerical solver for large-scale dynamics with tuned representations for small-scale processes such as cloud formation. Recently, machine learning (ML) models trained on reanalysis data achieved comparable or better skill than GCMs for deterministic weather forecasting. However, these models have not demonstrated improved ensemble forecasts, or shown sufficient stability for long-term weather and climate simulations. Here we present the first GCM that combines a differentiable solver for atmospheric dynamics with ML components, and show that it can generate forecasts of deterministic weather, ensemble weather and climate on par with the best ML and physics-based methods. NeuralGCM is competitive with ML models for 1-10 day forecasts, and with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ensemble prediction for 1-15 day forecasts. With prescribed sea surface temperature, NeuralGCM can accurately track climate metrics such as global mean temperature for multiple decades, and climate forecasts with 140 km resolution exhibit emergent phenomena such as realistic frequency and trajectories of tropical cyclones. For both weather and climate, our approach offers orders of magnitude computational savings over conventional GCMs. Our results show that end-to-end deep learning is compatible with tasks performed by conventional GCMs, and can enhance the large-scale physical simulations that are essential for understanding and predicting the Earth system.

  • 16 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024

Urban Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models for Climate-Resilient Housing: Scaling Diffusion Transformers for Disaster Risk Prediction

Climate hazards increasingly disrupt urban transportation and emergency-response operations by damaging housing stock, degrading infrastructure, and reducing network accessibility. This paper presents Skjold-DiT, a diffusion-transformer framework that integrates heterogeneous spatio-temporal urban data to forecast building-level climate-risk indicators while explicitly incorporating transportation-network structure and accessibility signals relevant to intelligent vehicles (e.g., emergency reachability and evacuation-route constraints). Concretely, Skjold-DiT enables hazard-conditioned routing constraints by producing calibrated, uncertainty-aware accessibility layers (reachability, travel-time inflation, and route redundancy) that can be consumed by intelligent-vehicle routing and emergency dispatch systems. Skjold-DiT combines: (1) Fjell-Prompt, a prompt-based conditioning interface designed to support cross-city transfer; (2) Norrland-Fusion, a cross-modal attention mechanism unifying hazard maps/imagery, building attributes, demographics, and transportation infrastructure into a shared latent representation; and (3) Valkyrie-Forecast, a counterfactual simulator for generating probabilistic risk trajectories under intervention prompts. We introduce the Baltic-Caspian Urban Resilience (BCUR) dataset with 847,392 building-level observations across six cities, including multi-hazard annotations (e.g., flood and heat indicators) and transportation accessibility features. Experiments evaluate prediction quality, cross-city generalization, calibration, and downstream transportation-relevant outcomes, including reachability and hazard-conditioned travel times under counterfactual interventions.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5 2

Pangu-Weather: A 3D High-Resolution Model for Fast and Accurate Global Weather Forecast

In this paper, we present Pangu-Weather, a deep learning based system for fast and accurate global weather forecast. For this purpose, we establish a data-driven environment by downloading 43 years of hourly global weather data from the 5th generation of ECMWF reanalysis (ERA5) data and train a few deep neural networks with about 256 million parameters in total. The spatial resolution of forecast is 0.25^circtimes0.25^circ, comparable to the ECMWF Integrated Forecast Systems (IFS). More importantly, for the first time, an AI-based method outperforms state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods in terms of accuracy (latitude-weighted RMSE and ACC) of all factors (e.g., geopotential, specific humidity, wind speed, temperature, etc.) and in all time ranges (from one hour to one week). There are two key strategies to improve the prediction accuracy: (i) designing a 3D Earth Specific Transformer (3DEST) architecture that formulates the height (pressure level) information into cubic data, and (ii) applying a hierarchical temporal aggregation algorithm to alleviate cumulative forecast errors. In deterministic forecast, Pangu-Weather shows great advantages for short to medium-range forecast (i.e., forecast time ranges from one hour to one week). Pangu-Weather supports a wide range of downstream forecast scenarios, including extreme weather forecast (e.g., tropical cyclone tracking) and large-member ensemble forecast in real-time. Pangu-Weather not only ends the debate on whether AI-based methods can surpass conventional NWP methods, but also reveals novel directions for improving deep learning weather forecast systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 3, 2022

Met^2Net: A Decoupled Two-Stage Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model for Complex Meteorological Systems

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to global climate change urges accurate weather prediction. Recently, great advances have been made by the end-to-end methods, thanks to deep learning techniques, but they face limitations of representation inconsistency in multivariable integration and struggle to effectively capture the dependency between variables, which is required in complex weather systems. Treating different variables as distinct modalities and applying a two-stage training approach from multimodal models can partially alleviate this issue, but due to the inconformity in training tasks between the two stages, the results are often suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit two-stage training method, configuring separate encoders and decoders for each variable. In detailed, in the first stage, the Translator is frozen while the Encoders and Decoders learn a shared latent space, in the second stage, the Encoders and Decoders are frozen, and the Translator captures inter-variable interactions for prediction. Besides, by introducing a self-attention mechanism for multivariable fusion in the latent space, the performance achieves further improvements. Empirically, extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it reduces the MSE for near-surface air temperature and relative humidity predictions by 28.82\% and 23.39\%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShremG/Met2Net.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025 1

A Space-Time Transformer for Precipitation Forecasting

Meteorological agencies around the world rely on real-time flood guidance to issue live-saving advisories and warnings. For decades traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models have been state-of-the-art for precipitation forecasting. However, physically-parameterized models suffer from a few core limitations: first, solving PDEs to resolve atmospheric dynamics is computationally demanding, and second, these methods degrade in performance at nowcasting timescales (i.e., 0-4 hour lead-times). Motivated by these shortcomings, recent work proposes AI-weather prediction (AI-WP) alternatives that learn to emulate analysis data with neural networks. While these data-driven approaches have enjoyed enormous success across diverse spatial and temporal resolutions, applications of video-understanding architectures for weather forecasting remain underexplored. To address these gaps, we propose SaTformer: a video transformer built on full space-time attention that skillfully forecasts extreme precipitation from satellite radiances. Along with our novel architecture, we introduce techniques to tame long-tailed precipitation datasets. Namely, we reformulate precipitation regression into a classification problem, and employ a class-weighted loss to address label imbalances. Our model scored first place on the NeurIPS Weather4Cast 2025 Cumulative Rainfall challenge. Code and model weights are available: https://github.com/leharris3/satformer

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 14, 2025

Post-processing Probabilistic Forecasts of the Solar Wind by Data Mining Similar Scenarios

The solar wind speed at Earth is one of the most important parameters regarding the effects of space weather on society. Thus far, most approaches for predicting the solar wind speed produce a single-value time series without uncertainty, or utilize ensemble methods which require custom calibration development. In this study, a method is developed that produces calibrated probabilistic forecasts of the solar wind speed using skew normal distributions and a novel extension of analog ensembles. In our extension, the single-value predictions from a baseline model of the next Δt days are used along with Δwindow hours of recent observations and single-value predictions to create a forecasting scenario vector that is compared against a historical database for outcomes. The baseline model used is the combined Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport-Wang Sheeley Arge (ADAPT-WSA) model and the WSA point parcel simulation, but the method is directly applicable to other deterministic models including components such as Enlil or the Heliospheric Upwind Extrapolation with time dependence model (HUXt). The approach works notably well on the benchmark of whether observations fall within the p^{th} percentile p% of the time (for p between 0 and 100). Falling back on the mean or median of the predicted distribution as a non-probabilistic prediction yields a direct improvement in root-mean-square error (RMSE) over the original WSA point parcel simulation, and is shown to beat approx 1 solar rotation recurrence for 1-5 day ahead forecasts.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 11

UMDATrack: Unified Multi-Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions

Visual object tracking has gained promising progress in past decades. Most of the existing approaches focus on learning target representation in well-conditioned daytime data, while for the unconstrained real-world scenarios with adverse weather conditions, e.g. nighttime or foggy environment, the tremendous domain shift leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose UMDATrack, which is capable of maintaining high-quality target state prediction under various adverse weather conditions within a unified domain adaptation framework. Specifically, we first use a controllable scenario generator to synthesize a small amount of unlabeled videos (less than 2% frames in source daytime datasets) in multiple weather conditions under the guidance of different text prompts. Afterwards, we design a simple yet effective domain-customized adapter (DCA), allowing the target objects' representation to rapidly adapt to various weather conditions without redundant model updating. Furthermore, to enhance the localization consistency between source and target domains, we propose a target-aware confidence alignment module (TCA) following optimal transport theorem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMDATrack can surpass existing advanced visual trackers and lead new state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/Z-Z188/UMDATrack.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025

ScatterNeRF: Seeing Through Fog with Physically-Based Inverse Neural Rendering

Vision in adverse weather conditions, whether it be snow, rain, or fog is challenging. In these scenarios, scattering and attenuation severly degrades image quality. Handling such inclement weather conditions, however, is essential to operate autonomous vehicles, drones and robotic applications where human performance is impeded the most. A large body of work explores removing weather-induced image degradations with dehazing methods. Most methods rely on single images as input and struggle to generalize from synthetic fully-supervised training approaches or to generate high fidelity results from unpaired real-world datasets. With data as bottleneck and most of today's training data relying on good weather conditions with inclement weather as outlier, we rely on an inverse rendering approach to reconstruct the scene content. We introduce ScatterNeRF, a neural rendering method which adequately renders foggy scenes and decomposes the fog-free background from the participating media-exploiting the multiple views from a short automotive sequence without the need for a large training data corpus. Instead, the rendering approach is optimized on the multi-view scene itself, which can be typically captured by an autonomous vehicle, robot or drone during operation. Specifically, we propose a disentangled representation for the scattering volume and the scene objects, and learn the scene reconstruction with physics-inspired losses. We validate our method by capturing multi-view In-the-Wild data and controlled captures in a large-scale fog chamber.

  • 6 authors
·
May 3, 2023

MR-GNF: Multi-Resolution Graph Neural Forecasting on Ellipsoidal Meshes for Efficient Regional Weather Prediction

Weather forecasting offers an ideal testbed for artificial intelligence (AI) to learn complex, multi-scale physical systems. Traditional numerical weather prediction remains computationally costly for frequent regional updates, as high-resolution nests require intensive boundary coupling. We introduce Multi-Resolution Graph Neural Forecasting (MR-GNF), a lightweight, physics-aware model that performs short-term regional forecasts directly on an ellipsoidal, multi-scale graph of the Earth. The framework couples a 0.25° region of interest with a 0.5° context belt and 1.0° outer domain, enabling continuous cross-scale message passing without explicit nested boundaries. Its axial graph-attention network alternates vertical self-attention across pressure levels with horizontal graph attention across surface nodes, capturing implicit 3-D structure in just 1.6 M parameters. Trained on 40 years of ERA5 reanalysis (1980-2024), MR-GNF delivers stable +6 h to +24 h forecasts for near-surface temperature, wind, and precipitation over the UK-Ireland sector. Despite a total compute cost below 80 GPU-hours on a single RTX 6000 Ada, the model matches or exceeds heavier regional AI systems while preserving physical consistency across scales. These results demonstrate that graph-based neural operators can achieve trustworthy, high-resolution weather prediction at a fraction of NWP cost, opening a practical path toward AI-driven early-warning and renewable-energy forecasting systems. Project page and code: https://github.com/AndriiShchur/MR-GNF

  • 2 authors
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Mar 12

Machine Learning-Ready Data Sets for the Analysis and Nowcasting of Atmospheric Radiation at Aviation Altitudes

Nowcasting and forecasting of the radiation environment in the Earth's lower atmosphere are critical for the safety of aircraft and spacecraft crews and passengers. Currently, this problem is addressed by employing statistical and physics-based models that take into account particle transport and precipitation. However, given the increased number of radiation measurements available to the community, it is possible to start developing data-driven approaches. We prepared Machine Learning-ready (ML-ready) datasets to nowcast the effective dose rates at aviation altitudes. The presented datasets contain 92,476 individual measurements from 589 flights obtained by the Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) experiment from 2013 to 2023. The ARMAS measurements are augmented with the properties of the Geospace environment, such as solar soft X-ray and proton fluxes, solar wind properties, secondary cosmic ray neutrons, space weather indexes, and global solar activity indicators (such as daily sunspot number). ARMAS data are separated into three partitions, ensuring that (1) the data points from a single flight remain within the same partition, and (2) each partition samples the flight locations and Geospace environment conditions equally. Several versions of the datasets allow predictions based on point-in-time measurements and use up to 24 hours of Geospace parameter history. The test of the use case demonstrates a possibility of nowcasting ARMAS measurements with accuracies slightly better than the considered physics-based models. The publicly available ML-ready datasets could serve as the first step in data preparation for ML-driven nowcasting and forecasting of the radiation environment.

  • 13 authors
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Feb 5

Complementing Onboard Sensors with Satellite Map: A New Perspective for HD Map Construction

High-definition (HD) maps play a crucial role in autonomous driving systems. Recent methods have attempted to construct HD maps in real-time using vehicle onboard sensors. Due to the inherent limitations of onboard sensors, which include sensitivity to detection range and susceptibility to occlusion by nearby vehicles, the performance of these methods significantly declines in complex scenarios and long-range detection tasks. In this paper, we explore a new perspective that boosts HD map construction through the use of satellite maps to complement onboard sensors. We initially generate the satellite map tiles for each sample in nuScenes and release a complementary dataset for further research. To enable better integration of satellite maps with existing methods, we propose a hierarchical fusion module, which includes feature-level fusion and BEV-level fusion. The feature-level fusion, composed of a mask generator and a masked cross-attention mechanism, is used to refine the features from onboard sensors. The BEV-level fusion mitigates the coordinate differences between features obtained from onboard sensors and satellite maps through an alignment module. The experimental results on the augmented nuScenes showcase the seamless integration of our module into three existing HD map construction methods. The satellite maps and our proposed module notably enhance their performance in both HD map semantic segmentation and instance detection tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024

Cross-variable Linear Integrated ENhanced Transformer for Photovoltaic power forecasting

Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting plays a crucial role in optimizing the operation and planning of PV systems, thereby enabling efficient energy management and grid integration. However, un certainties caused by fluctuating weather conditions and complex interactions between different variables pose significant challenges to accurate PV power forecasting. In this study, we propose PV-Client (Cross-variable Linear Integrated ENhanced Transformer for Photovoltaic power forecasting) to address these challenges and enhance PV power forecasting accuracy. PV-Client employs an ENhanced Transformer module to capture complex interactions of various features in PV systems, and utilizes a linear module to learn trend information in PV power. Diverging from conventional time series-based Transformer models that use cross-time Attention to learn dependencies between different time steps, the Enhanced Transformer module integrates cross-variable Attention to capture dependencies between PV power and weather factors. Furthermore, PV-Client streamlines the embedding and position encoding layers by replacing the Decoder module with a projection layer. Experimental results on three real-world PV power datasets affirm PV-Client's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in PV power forecasting. Specifically, PV-Client surpasses the second-best model GRU by 5.3% in MSE metrics and 0.9% in accuracy metrics at the Jingang Station. Similarly, PV-Client outperforms the second-best model SVR by 10.1% in MSE metrics and 0.2% in accuracy metrics at the Xinqingnian Station, and PV-Client exhibits superior performance compared to the second-best model SVR with enhancements of 3.4% in MSE metrics and 0.9% in accuracy metrics at the Hongxing Station.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

ClimateLearn: Benchmarking Machine Learning for Weather and Climate Modeling

Modeling weather and climate is an essential endeavor to understand the near- and long-term impacts of climate change, as well as inform technology and policymaking for adaptation and mitigation efforts. In recent years, there has been a surging interest in applying data-driven methods based on machine learning for solving core problems such as weather forecasting and climate downscaling. Despite promising results, much of this progress has been impaired due to the lack of large-scale, open-source efforts for reproducibility, resulting in the use of inconsistent or underspecified datasets, training setups, and evaluations by both domain scientists and artificial intelligence researchers. We introduce ClimateLearn, an open-source PyTorch library that vastly simplifies the training and evaluation of machine learning models for data-driven climate science. ClimateLearn consists of holistic pipelines for dataset processing (e.g., ERA5, CMIP6, PRISM), implementation of state-of-the-art deep learning models (e.g., Transformers, ResNets), and quantitative and qualitative evaluation for standard weather and climate modeling tasks. We supplement these functionalities with extensive documentation, contribution guides, and quickstart tutorials to expand access and promote community growth. We have also performed comprehensive forecasting and downscaling experiments to showcase the capabilities and key features of our library. To our knowledge, ClimateLearn is the first large-scale, open-source effort for bridging research in weather and climate modeling with modern machine learning systems. Our library is available publicly at https://github.com/aditya-grover/climate-learn.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2023

WxC-Bench: A Novel Dataset for Weather and Climate Downstream Tasks

High-quality machine learning (ML)-ready datasets play a foundational role in developing new artificial intelligence (AI) models or fine-tuning existing models for scientific applications such as weather and climate analysis. Unfortunately, despite the growing development of new deep learning models for weather and climate, there is a scarcity of curated, pre-processed machine learning (ML)-ready datasets. Curating such high-quality datasets for developing new models is challenging particularly because the modality of the input data varies significantly for different downstream tasks addressing different atmospheric scales (spatial and temporal). Here we introduce WxC-Bench (Weather and Climate Bench), a multi-modal dataset designed to support the development of generalizable AI models for downstream use-cases in weather and climate research. WxC-Bench is designed as a dataset of datasets for developing ML-models for a complex weather and climate system, addressing selected downstream tasks as machine learning phenomenon. WxC-Bench encompasses several atmospheric processes from meso-beta (20 - 200 km) scale to synoptic scales (2500 km), such as aviation turbulence, hurricane intensity and track monitoring, weather analog search, gravity wave parameterization, and natural language report generation. We provide a comprehensive description of the dataset and also present a technical validation for baseline analysis. The dataset and code to prepare the ML-ready data have been made publicly available on Hugging Face -- https://huggingface.co/datasets/nasa-impact/WxC-Bench

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

AtmoRep: A stochastic model of atmosphere dynamics using large scale representation learning

The atmosphere affects humans in a multitude of ways, from loss of life due to adverse weather effects to long-term social and economic impacts on societies. Computer simulations of atmospheric dynamics are, therefore, of great importance for the well-being of our and future generations. Here, we propose AtmoRep, a novel, task-independent stochastic computer model of atmospheric dynamics that can provide skillful results for a wide range of applications. AtmoRep uses large-scale representation learning from artificial intelligence to determine a general description of the highly complex, stochastic dynamics of the atmosphere from the best available estimate of the system's historical trajectory as constrained by observations. This is enabled by a novel self-supervised learning objective and a unique ensemble that samples from the stochastic model with a variability informed by the one in the historical record. The task-independent nature of AtmoRep enables skillful results for a diverse set of applications without specifically training for them and we demonstrate this for nowcasting, temporal interpolation, model correction, and counterfactuals. We also show that AtmoRep can be improved with additional data, for example radar observations, and that it can be extended to tasks such as downscaling. Our work establishes that large-scale neural networks can provide skillful, task-independent models of atmospheric dynamics. With this, they provide a novel means to make the large record of atmospheric observations accessible for applications and for scientific inquiry, complementing existing simulations based on first principles.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 25, 2023

VITA: Variational Pretraining of Transformers for Climate-Robust Crop Yield Forecasting

Accurate crop yield forecasting is essential for global food security. However, current AI models systematically underperform when yields deviate from historical trends. We attribute this to the lack of rich, physically grounded datasets directly linking atmospheric states to yields. To address this, we introduce VITA (Variational Inference Transformer for Asymmetric data), a variational pretraining framework that learns representations from large satellite-based weather datasets and transfers to the ground-based limited measurements available for yield prediction. VITA is trained using detailed meteorological variables as proxy targets during pretraining and learns to predict latent atmospheric states under a seasonality-aware sinusoidal prior. This allows the model to be fine-tuned using limited weather statistics during deployment. Applied to 763 counties in the U.S. Corn Belt, VITA achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting corn and soybean yields across all evaluation scenarios, particularly during extreme years, with statistically significant improvements (paired t-test, p < 0.0001). Importantly, VITA outperforms prior frameworks like GNN-RNN without soil data, and bigger foundational models (e.g., Chronos-Bolt) with less compute, making it practical for real-world use--especially in data-scarce regions. This work highlights how domain-aware AI design can overcome data limitations and support resilient agricultural forecasting in a changing climate.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 5, 2025

Uncertainty-Aware Hourly Air Temperature Mapping at 2 km Resolution via Physics-Guided Deep Learning

Near-surface air temperature is a key physical property of the Earth's surface. Although weather stations offer continuous monitoring and satellites provide broad spatial coverage, no single data source offers seamless data in a spatiotemporal fashion. Here, we propose a data-driven, physics-guided deep learning approach to generate hourly air temperature data at 2 km resolution over the contiguous United States. The approach, called Amplifier Air-Transformer, first reconstructs GOES-16 surface temperature data obscured by clouds. It does so through a neural network encoded with the annual temperature cycle, incorporating a linear term to amplify ERA5 temperature values at finer scales and convolutional layers to capture spatiotemporal variations. Then, another neural network transforms the reconstructed surface temperature into air temperature by leveraging its latent relationship with key Earth surface properties. The approach is further enhanced with predictive uncertainty estimation through deep ensemble learning to improve reliability. The proposed approach is built and tested on 77.7 billion surface temperature pixels and 155 million air temperature records from weather stations across the contiguous United States (2018-2024), achieving hourly air temperature mapping accuracy of 1.93 C in station-based validation. The proposed approach streamlines surface temperature reconstruction and air temperature prediction, and it can be extended to other satellite sources for seamless air temperature monitoring at high spatiotemporal resolution. The generated data of this study can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15252812, and the project webpage can be found at https://skrisliu.com/HourlyAirTemp2kmUSA/.

  • 3 authors
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Sep 14, 2025

Generative Nowcasting of Marine Fog Visibility in the Grand Banks area and Sable Island in Canada

This study presents the application of generative deep learning techniques to evaluate marine fog visibility nowcasting using the FATIMA (Fog and turbulence interactions in the marine atmosphere) campaign observations collected during July 2022 in the North Atlantic in the Grand Banks area and vicinity of Sable Island (SI), northeast of Canada. The measurements were collected using the Vaisala Forward Scatter Sensor model FD70 and Weather Transmitter model WXT50, and Gill R3A ultrasonic anemometer mounted on the Research Vessel Atlantic Condor. To perform nowcasting, the time series of fog visibility (Vis), wind speed, dew point depression, and relative humidity with respect to water were preprocessed to have lagged time step features. Generative nowcasting of Vis time series for lead times of 30 and 60 minutes were performed using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) regression at visibility thresholds of Vis < 1 km and < 10 km. Extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) was used as a baseline method for comparison against cGAN. At the 30 min lead time, Vis was best predicted with cGAN at Vis < 1 km (RMSE = 0.151 km) and with XGBoost at Vis < 10 km (RMSE = 2.821 km). At the 60 min lead time, Vis was best predicted with XGBoost at Vis < 1 km (RMSE = 0.167 km) and Vis < 10 km (RMSE = 3.508 km), but the cGAN RMSE was similar to XGBoost. Despite nowcasting Vis at 30 min being quite difficult, the ability of the cGAN model to track the variation in Vis at 1 km suggests that there is potential for generative analysis of marine fog visibility using observational meteorological parameters.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 9, 2024

Scalable Uncertainty Quantification for Extreme Weather Forecasting via Empirical Neural Tangent Kernels

Deep learning weather models now match numerical weather prediction accuracy while running orders of magnitude faster, but produce deterministic forecasts without uncertainty estimates, a critical gap for high-stakes decisions during extreme weather events. This paper proposes Neural Tangent Kernel-based uncertainty quantification (NTK-UQ) using last-layer empirical features. Theoretical analysis predicts that UQ quality is architecture-dependent through two mechanisms. First, a variance collapse mechanism explains when UQ fails: when the eigenvalue truncation rank approaches the effective rank of the feature space, the GP correction term consumes nearly all prior variance, destroying discrimination between tropical cyclones and routine conditions; architectures with concentrated spectra (spectral operators) require aggressive truncation (k leq 10), while attention-based models tolerate full-rank computation. Second, decomposition performance depends on the non-Gaussian, heavy-tailed structure of extreme weather: Independent Component Analysis exploits higher-order statistics (kurtosis, negentropy) to isolate heavy-tailed extreme-event features, achieving higher discrimination than singular value decomposition, which captures only second-order variance. A data-driven selection rule chooses ICA or SVD from the feature eigenspectrum concentration ratio, correctly prescribing the superior decomposition for all four evaluated architectures. Compared to split conformal prediction (the natural post-hoc baseline), NTK-UQ achieves 31--37\% sharper prediction intervals at 90\% coverage, and uniquely produces adaptive intervals that scale with extreme event severity, which conformal prediction cannot achieve by construction. The framework requires no retraining; inference-time uncertainty requires only a single matrix-vector product per sample.

  • 3 authors
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May 31

AllWeatherNet:Unified Image Enhancement for Autonomous Driving under Adverse Weather and Lowlight-conditions

Adverse conditions like snow, rain, nighttime, and fog, pose challenges for autonomous driving perception systems. Existing methods have limited effectiveness in improving essential computer vision tasks, such as semantic segmentation, and often focus on only one specific condition, such as removing rain or translating nighttime images into daytime ones. To address these limitations, we propose a method to improve the visual quality and clarity degraded by such adverse conditions. Our method, AllWeather-Net, utilizes a novel hierarchical architecture to enhance images across all adverse conditions. This architecture incorporates information at three semantic levels: scene, object, and texture, by discriminating patches at each level. Furthermore, we introduce a Scaled Illumination-aware Attention Mechanism (SIAM) that guides the learning towards road elements critical for autonomous driving perception. SIAM exhibits robustness, remaining unaffected by changes in weather conditions or environmental scenes. AllWeather-Net effectively transforms images into normal weather and daytime scenes, demonstrating superior image enhancement results and subsequently enhancing the performance of semantic segmentation, with up to a 5.3% improvement in mIoU in the trained domain. We also show our model's generalization ability by applying it to unseen domains without re-training, achieving up to 3.9% mIoU improvement. Code can be accessed at: https://github.com/Jumponthemoon/AllWeatherNet.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

A Controlled Visual-Backbone Benchmark for Multimodal Short-Term Solar Irradiance Forecasting

Sky-image irradiance studies often compare forecasting systems in which the image encoder, temporal model, fusion block, target definition, and training recipe all change together. We use a narrower protocol: the multimodal forecasting pipeline is fixed, and only the visual backbone is varied. The shared setup keeps preprocessing, clear-sky-index normalization, weather-history encoding, fusion, regression head, loss, optimizer schedule, seed, and chronological split policy unchanged. We compare ConvNeXt, Swin Transformer, VMamba, Spatial Mamba, and MambaVision backbones for 10min-ahead forecasting on Folsom and a strict matched NREL split. Forecast skill is measured against clear-sky-index smart persistence, and temporal-only rows are reported as weather-history diagnostics rather than as the main ranking criterion. On the Folsom strict split, all evaluated visual-backbone runs improve over smart persistence. In the evaluated single-seed strict runs, VMamba Small and Swin Base reach matched Folsom RMSE values of 65.39 W/m^2 and 65.50 W/m^2; the temporal-only diagnostic reaches 69.51 W/m^2. On the 313-sample NREL strict split, smart persistence remains strongest at 17.48 W/m^2, while the lowest visual RMSE is obtained by Swin Tiny at 23.76 W/m^2. These results provide a reproducible encoder comparison under one fixed multimodal operating point rather than establishing architecture-level dominance, statistically resolved ranking, or fully optimized forecasting performance. Code available here: https://github.com/Oshadha345/irradiance_benchmark

  • 7 authors
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Jul 25

Adaptive Ensemble Learning: Boosting Model Performance through Intelligent Feature Fusion in Deep Neural Networks

In this paper, we present an Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework that aims to boost the performance of deep neural networks by intelligently fusing features through ensemble learning techniques. The proposed framework integrates ensemble learning strategies with deep learning architectures to create a more robust and adaptable model capable of handling complex tasks across various domains. By leveraging intelligent feature fusion methods, the Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework generates more discriminative and effective feature representations, leading to improved model performance and generalization capabilities. We conducted extensive experiments and evaluations on several benchmark datasets, including image classification, object detection, natural language processing, and graph-based learning tasks. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline models and traditional feature fusion techniques, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing deep learning models' performance. Furthermore, we provide insights into the impact of intelligent feature fusion on model performance and discuss the potential applications of the Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework in real-world scenarios. The paper also explores the design and implementation of adaptive ensemble models, ensemble training strategies, and meta-learning techniques, which contribute to the framework's versatility and adaptability. In conclusion, the Adaptive Ensemble Learning framework represents a significant advancement in the field of feature fusion and ensemble learning for deep neural networks, with the potential to transform a wide range of applications across multiple domains.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 4, 2023

Revisiting urban heat indices in Switzerland using low-cost measurement networks

Urban populations are increasingly exposed to extreme heat events such as heatwaves, which can be exacerbated in cities due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. With the aim of developing adaptation strategies, recent years have seen a growing interest in deploying high-resolution measurement networks using low-cost devices (LCDs), which enable the evaluation of intra-urban temperature distribution and its impacts at an unprecedented spatial resolution. However, the reliability of LCD measurements has been called into question, especially regarding potential overheating due to inadequate radiation shielding. In this study, we develop a statistical method to correct temperature biases based on short-wave radiation using a generalized additive model (GAM) and then apply it to LCD measurements in the urban climate networks of the cities of Bern, Lausanne, Neuchatel and Zurich (Switzerland). To that end, we first calibrate the correction procedure to the LCD models used in each city using an intercomparison field study, in which the LCD models are collocated next to a professional automated weather station (AWS) operated by MeteoSwiss in the rural surroundings of Bern. Then, we evaluate how these corrections can influence two climate indices, namely the number of tropical nights and the number of heat warnings issued in each city according to MeteoSwiss heat warning system. The findings suggest that the current AWS underestimate the heat warnings, whereas some LCD models likely overestimate them due to radiative errors. Nevertheless, uncorrected LCD measurements still provide a more reliable estimate of urban temperatures than AWS located outside urban settings. The insights can guide selection of LCD models for new monitoring networks and support the application of model-specific radiative bias corrections to existing LCDs, enabling more accurate assessments of heat and its impacts.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 8

Representing the Surface Ocean in ECMWF's data-driven forecasting system AIFS

Machine-learning (ML) models, such as the AIFS at the ECMWF, have revolutionised weather forecasting in recent years. We present an extension of the AIFS that jointly models the atmosphere and surface ocean, including ocean waves and sea ice. The primary objective of this extension is to enhance machine-learning medium-range forecasting and enable new use cases by expanding the weather state to better capture coupled surface processes. Our approach departs from traditional numerical models by not having two separate models for the atmosphere and marine components. The joint model instead learns correlations across the entire atmosphere-ocean interface in a component-agnostic way, and can exploit the expressive capacity of ML architectures to learn cross-component relationships directly from the data. We leverage tailored and targeted datasets and solve model design challenges such as missing values over land, multi-scale temporal dynamics, and physical realism of forecast fields and demonstrate the utility of loss scaling in guiding the learning process. We evaluate how representing the surface ocean affects medium-range weather forecasts. We also assess the model's ability to predict surface-ocean fields, including wave swell and tropical-cyclone cold wakes. For nearly all evaluated marine variables, we observe an improvement of approximately one day in forecast skill at medium-range lead times compared to physics-based models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the model is robust to idealised initial conditions outside the training distribution and responds to them in a physically consistent way. Overall, our findings suggest that the joint AIFS modelling approach offers significant potential for combined atmosphere-ocean forecasting. Our work provides a solid foundation for future development of data-driven coupled Earth system models with greater flexibility and physical fidelity.

  • 25 authors
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Apr 27

In the Search for Optimal Multi-view Learning Models for Crop Classification with Global Remote Sensing Data

Studying and analyzing cropland is a difficult task due to its dynamic and heterogeneous growth behavior. Usually, diverse data sources can be collected for its estimation. Although deep learning models have proven to excel in the crop classification task, they face substantial challenges when dealing with multiple inputs, named Multi-View Learning (MVL). The methods used in the MVL scenario can be structured based on the encoder architecture, the fusion strategy, and the optimization technique. The literature has primarily focused on using specific encoder architectures for local regions, lacking a deeper exploration of other components in the MVL methodology. In contrast, we investigate the simultaneous selection of the fusion strategy and encoder architecture, assessing global-scale cropland and crop-type classifications. We use a range of five fusion strategies (Input, Feature, Decision, Ensemble, Hybrid) and five temporal encoders (LSTM, GRU, TempCNN, TAE, L-TAE) as possible configurations in the MVL method. We use the CropHarvest dataset for validation, which provides optical, radar, weather time series, and topographic information as input data. We found that in scenarios with a limited number of labeled samples, a unique configuration is insufficient for all the cases. Instead, a specialized combination should be meticulously sought, including an encoder and fusion strategy. To streamline this search process, we suggest identifying the optimal encoder architecture tailored for a particular fusion strategy, and then determining the most suitable fusion strategy for the classification task. We provide a methodological framework for researchers exploring crop classification through an MVL methodology.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024 1

HourGlass: A probabilistic data-driven temporal downscaler for global and regional weather forecasting

Many forecast applications require high frequency temporal resolution, yet most state-of-the-art data-driven weather forecasting systems operate at 6-hourly resolution. Although direct hourly forecasting is possible, it suffers from error accumulation and temporal inconsistency. We introduce HourGlass, a probabilistic data-driven temporal downscaling method that reconstructs the evolution between forecast states. HourGlass is trained using variants of the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) preserving small-scale spatial variability while encouraging temporal consistency. Unlike existing deterministic temporal downscaling approaches, which tend to produce overly smooth fields, HourGlass generates realistic probabilistic forecasts. Training on forecast trajectories rather than reanalysis or analysis data also avoids the temporal inconsistencies present in datasets used by previous methods. We evaluate HourGlass in two settings: AIFS-HourGlass, applied globally to ECMWF's AIFS-Single and AIFS-ENS forecast systems, and Bris-HourGlass, applied regionally to MET Norway's high-resolution stretched-grid ensemble model, Bris. Verification against observations shows that both models retain the skill of their underlying forecasting systems while producing temporally coherent hourly forecasts with realistic small-scale variability. Case studies demonstrate physically consistent evolution during rapidly developing weather events, including extratropical cyclones and organised convection. Hourly precipitation remains challenging: HourGlass improves the spatial realism of precipitation fields but still underestimates the most intense extremes, a common limitation of data-driven weather forecasting models. These results demonstrate that HourGlass effectively bridges the gap between 6-hourly data-driven forecasts and the hourly products required for operational regional and global forecasting.

  • 19 authors
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Jul 12

TokaMind for Power Grid: Cross-Domain Transfer from Fusion Plasma

TokaMind is a multi-modal transformer (MMT) foundation model pre-trained on tokamak plasma diagnostics data from MAST, where it was shown to outperform CNN-based approaches on fusion benchmarks. We investigate whether its learned representations generalize to physically distinct but structurally analogous domains. Through systematic experimentation across four domains-industrial bearing degradation, NASA CMAPSS turbofan degradation, and two independent power grid PMU datasets-we identify four transfer-favoring characteristics that help explain where TokaMind's pretrained representations are most effective. Power grid synchrophasor data matches this target-domain profile most directly, while industrial degradation datasets demonstrate that TokaMind can still yield useful performance under partial alignment, especially when task design and feature construction expose physically meaningful degradation structure. On the GESL/PNNL 500-event benchmark with provider-aware evaluation, TokaMind achieves test F1 = 0.837 pm 0.040 (3~seeds) for severe event classification. Our central finding, however, is not the aggregate score: classification difficulty is structurally determined by provider-level grid topology, not model capacity. In the single-window early-warning regime, TokaMind outperforms a CNN baseline (F1~0.889 vs.~0.878)--a reversal that disappears as more event windows are provided. Furthermore, Critical Slowing Down (CSD) indicators, used as a confidence gate rather than a classification label, improve F1 from 0.696 to 0.750 at 63% coverage-outperforming the CNN baseline (0.636) at any coverage level. These results establish the first cross-domain validation of TokaMind outside nuclear fusion and propose a transferability framework and revised evaluation protocol for multi-source PMU datasets.

  • 3 authors
·
May 9

NeuroDDAF: Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields with Evidential Fusion for Air Quality Forecasting

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for protecting public health and guiding environmental policy, yet it remains challenging due to nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics, wind-driven transport, and distribution shifts across regions. Physics-based models are interpretable but computationally expensive and often rely on restrictive assumptions, whereas purely data-driven models can be accurate but may lack robustness and calibrated uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose Neural Dynamic Diffusion-Advection Fields (NeuroDDAF), a physics-informed forecasting framework that unifies neural representation learning with open-system transport modeling. NeuroDDAF integrates (i) a GRU-Graph Attention encoder to capture temporal dynamics and wind-aware spatial interactions, (ii) a Fourier-domain diffusion-advection module with learnable residuals, (iii) a wind-modulated latent Neural ODE to model continuous-time evolution under time-varying connectivity, and (iv) an evidential fusion mechanism that adaptively combines physics-guided and neural forecasts while quantifying uncertainty. Experiments on four urban datasets (Beijing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Ancona) across 1-3 day horizons show that NeuroDDAF consistently outperforms strong baselines, including AirPhyNet, achieving up to 9.7% reduction in RMSE and 9.4% reduction in MAE on long-term forecasts. On the Beijing dataset, NeuroDDAF attains an RMSE of 41.63 μg/m^3 for 1-day prediction and 48.88 μg/m^3 for 3-day prediction, representing the best performance among all compared methods. In addition, NeuroDDAF improves cross-city generalization and yields well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, as confirmed by ensemble variance analysis and case studies under varying wind conditions.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 31

AIFS-CRPS: Ensemble forecasting using a model trained with a loss function based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score

Over the last three decades, ensemble forecasts have become an integral part of forecasting the weather. They provide users with more complete information than single forecasts as they permit to estimate the probability of weather events by representing the sources of uncertainties and accounting for the day-to-day variability of error growth in the atmosphere. This paper presents a novel approach to obtain a weather forecast model for ensemble forecasting with machine-learning. AIFS-CRPS is a variant of the Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS) developed at ECMWF. Its loss function is based on a proper score, the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). For the loss, the almost fair CRPS is introduced because it approximately removes the bias in the score due to finite ensemble size yet avoids a degeneracy of the fair CRPS. The trained model is stochastic and can generate as many exchangeable members as desired and computationally feasible in inference. For medium-range forecasts AIFS-CRPS outperforms the physics-based Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) ensemble for the majority of variables and lead times. For subseasonal forecasts, AIFS-CRPS outperforms the IFS ensemble before calibration and is competitive with the IFS ensemble when forecasts are evaluated as anomalies to remove the influence of model biases.

  • 18 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024

SEEDS: Emulation of Weather Forecast Ensembles with Diffusion Models

Probabilistic forecasting is crucial to decision-making under uncertainty about future weather. The dominant approach is to use an ensemble of forecasts to represent and quantify uncertainty in operational numerical weather prediction. However, generating ensembles is computationally costly. In this paper, we propose to generate ensemble forecasts at scale by leveraging recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. Our approach learns a data-driven probabilistic diffusion model from the 5-member ensemble GEFS reforecast dataset. The model can then be sampled efficiently to produce realistic weather forecasts, conditioned on a few members of the operational GEFS forecasting system. The generated ensembles have similar predictive skill as the full GEFS 31-member ensemble, evaluated against ERA5 reanalysis, and emulate well the statistics of large physics-based ensembles. We also apply the same methodology to developing a diffusion model for generative post-processing: the model directly learns to correct biases present in the emulated forecasting system by leveraging reanalysis data as labels during training. Ensembles from this generative post-processing model show greater reliability and accuracy, particularly in extreme event classification. In general, they are more reliable and forecast the probability of extreme weather more accurately than the GEFS operational ensemble. Our models achieve these results at less than 1/10th of the computational cost incurred by the operational GEFS system.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 24, 2023

Evaluating Skill and Stability of ArchesWeather and ArchesWeatherGen under Multi-Decadal Climate Simulations

We evaluate the climate simulation capabilities of ArchesWeather and ArchesWeatherGen, two machine learning models originally trained for weather forecasting and evaluated up to a 10-day lead time. ArchesWeather is a deterministic model, while ArchesWeatherGen is a probabilistic flow-matching model leveraging ArchesWeather's forecasts, enabling ensemble-based uncertainty quantification. In this work, we adapt these models to act as forced atmospheric models by using additional conditioning on the monthly mean sea surface temperature (SST) and sea ice cover (SIC) as boundary conditions. In particular, we follow the AI Model Intercomparison Project (AIMIP) Phase 1 protocol, which, analogous to the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP), proposes a standardized experimental setup to evaluate the climate skill of ML-based forced atmospheric models. We present a comprehensive evaluation of both models under these conditions, including comparison against numerical climate models, ablation studies that examine key design choices in the extension, and an analysis of forced versus unforced configurations. Despite being originally developed for weather forecasting, we demonstrate that forced configurations of ArchesWeather and ArchesWeatherGen produce stable long-term climate simulations, have a stable annual cycle, and capture the drift of many climate variables. The models faithfully reproduce ERA5's climatology, large-scale circulations and interannual variability, and they capture the tails of the distributions.

  • 8 authors
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Aug 17

ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate

Most state-of-the-art approaches for weather and climate modeling are based on physics-informed numerical models of the atmosphere. These approaches aim to model the non-linear dynamics and complex interactions between multiple variables, which are challenging to approximate. Additionally, many such numerical models are computationally intensive, especially when modeling the atmospheric phenomenon at a fine-grained spatial and temporal resolution. Recent data-driven approaches based on machine learning instead aim to directly solve a downstream forecasting or projection task by learning a data-driven functional mapping using deep neural networks. However, these networks are trained using curated and homogeneous climate datasets for specific spatiotemporal tasks, and thus lack the generality of numerical models. We develop and demonstrate ClimaX, a flexible and generalizable deep learning model for weather and climate science that can be trained using heterogeneous datasets spanning different variables, spatio-temporal coverage, and physical groundings. ClimaX extends the Transformer architecture with novel encoding and aggregation blocks that allow effective use of available compute while maintaining general utility. ClimaX is pre-trained with a self-supervised learning objective on climate datasets derived from CMIP6. The pre-trained ClimaX can then be fine-tuned to address a breadth of climate and weather tasks, including those that involve atmospheric variables and spatio-temporal scales unseen during pretraining. Compared to existing data-driven baselines, we show that this generality in ClimaX results in superior performance on benchmarks for weather forecasting and climate projections, even when pretrained at lower resolutions and compute budgets.

  • 5 authors
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Jan 24, 2023

A Model RRNet for Spectral Information Exploitation and LAMOST Medium-resolution Spectrum Parameter Estimation

This work proposes a Residual Recurrent Neural Network (RRNet) for synthetically extracting spectral information, and estimating stellar atmospheric parameters together with 15 chemical element abundances for medium-resolution spectra from Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST). The RRNet consists of two fundamental modules: a residual module and a recurrent module. The residual module extracts spectral features based on the longitudinally driving power from parameters, while the recurrent module recovers spectral information and restrains the negative influences from noises based on Cross-band Belief Enhancement. RRNet is trained by the spectra from common stars between LAMOST DR7 and APOGEE-Payne catalog. The 17 stellar parameters and their uncertainties for 2.37 million medium-resolution spectra from LAMOST DR7 are predicted. For spectra with S/N >= 10, the precision of estimations Teff and log g are 88 K and 0.13 dex respectively, elements C, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Fe, Ni are 0.05 dex to 0.08 dex, and N, O, S, K, Ti, Cr, Mn are 0.09 dex to 0.14 dex, while that of Cu is 0.19 dex. Compared with StarNet and SPCANet, RRNet shows higher accuracy and robustness. In comparison to Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment and Galactic Archaeology with HERMES surveys, RRNet manifests good consistency within a reasonable range of bias. Finally, this work releases a catalog for 2.37 million medium-resolution spectra from the LAMOST DR7, the source code, the trained model and the experimental data respectively for astronomical science exploration and data processing algorithm research reference.

  • 3 authors
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May 30, 2022

TokaMark: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MAST Tokamak Plasma Models

Development and operation of commercially viable fusion energy reactors such as tokamaks require accurate predictions of plasma dynamics from sparse, noisy, and incomplete sensors readings. The complexity of the underlying physics and the heterogeneity of experimental data pose formidable challenges for conventional numerical methods, while simultaneously highlight the promise of modern data-native AI approaches. A major obstacle in realizing this potential is, however, the lack of curated, openly available datasets and standardized benchmarks. Existing fusion datasets are scarce, fragmented across institutions, facility-specific, and inconsistently annotated, which limits reproducibility and prevents a fair and scalable comparison of AI approaches. In this paper, we introduce TokaMark, a structured benchmark to evaluate AI models on real experimental data collected from the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). TokaMark provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to (i) unify access to multi-modal heterogeneous fusion data, and (ii) harmonize formats, metadata, temporal alignment and evaluation protocols to enable consistent cross-model and cross-task comparisons. The benchmark includes a curated list of 14 tasks spanning a range of physical mechanisms, exploiting a variety of diagnostics and covering multiple operational use cases. A baseline model is provided to facilitate transparent comparison and validation within a unified framework. By establishing a unified benchmark for both the fusion and AI-for-science communities, TokaMark aims to accelerate progress in data-driven AI-based plasma modeling, contributing to the broader goal of achieving sustainable and stable fusion energy. The benchmark, documentation, and tooling will be fully open sourced upon acceptance to encourage community adoption and contribution.

  • 16 authors
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Feb 11

Machine Learning Parameterization of the Multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) Convection Scheme

Warm-sector heavy rainfall often occurs along the coast of South China, and it is usually localized and long-lasting, making it challenging to predict. High-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are increasingly used to better resolve topographic features and forecast such high-impact weather events. However, when the grid spacing becomes comparable to the length scales of convection, known as the gray zone, the turbulent eddies in the atmospheric boundary layer are only partially resolved and parameterized to some extent. Whether using a convection parameterization (CP) scheme in the gray zone remains controversial. Scale-aware CP schemes are developed to enhance the representation of convective transport within the gray zone. The multi-scale Kain-Fritsch (MSKF) scheme includes modifications that allow for its effective implementation at a grid resolution as high as 2 km. In recent years, there has been an increasing application of machine learning (ML) models to various domains of atmospheric sciences, including the replacement of physical parameterizations with ML models. This work proposes a multi-output bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model as a replace the scale-aware MSKF CP scheme. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model is used to generate training and testing data over South China at a horizontal resolution of 5 km. Furthermore, the WRF model is coupled with the ML based CP scheme and compared with WRF simulations with original MSKF scheme. The results demonstrate that the Bi-LSTM model can achieve high accuracy, indicating the potential use of ML models to substitute the MSKF scheme in the gray zone.

  • 3 authors
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Nov 6, 2023

Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Let's Talk About The Weather

Current, self-supervised depth estimation architectures rely on clear and sunny weather scenes to train deep neural networks. However, in many locations, this assumption is too strong. For example in the UK (2021), 149 days consisted of rain. For these architectures to be effective in real-world applications, we must create models that can generalise to all weather conditions, times of the day and image qualities. Using a combination of computer graphics and generative models, one can augment existing sunny-weather data in a variety of ways that simulate adverse weather effects. While it is tempting to use such data augmentations for self-supervised depth, in the past this was shown to degrade performance instead of improving it. In this paper, we put forward a method that uses augmentations to remedy this problem. By exploiting the correspondence between unaugmented and augmented data we introduce a pseudo-supervised loss for both depth and pose estimation. This brings back some of the benefits of supervised learning while still not requiring any labels. We also make a series of practical recommendations which collectively offer a reliable, efficient framework for weather-related augmentation of self-supervised depth from monocular video. We present extensive testing to show that our method, Robust-Depth, achieves SotA performance on the KITTI dataset while significantly surpassing SotA on challenging, adverse condition data such as DrivingStereo, Foggy CityScape and NuScenes-Night. The project website can be found here https://kieran514.github.io/Robust-Depth-Project/.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 17, 2023

ClimSim: An open large-scale dataset for training high-resolution physics emulators in hybrid multi-scale climate simulators

Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore's Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res, https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_low-res, and https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_low-res_aqua-planet) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.

  • 56 authors
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Jun 14, 2023

WGAST: Weakly-Supervised Generative Network for Daily 10 m Land Surface Temperature Estimation via Spatio-Temporal Fusion

Urbanization, climate change, and agricultural stress are increasing the demand for precise and timely environmental monitoring. Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable in this context and is retrieved from remote sensing satellites. However, these systems face a trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution. While spatio-temporal fusion methods offer promising solutions, few have addressed the estimation of daily LST at 10 m resolution. In this study, we present WGAST, a Weakly-Supervised Generative Network for Daily 10 m LST Estimation via Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Terra MODIS, Landsat 8, and Sentinel-2. WGAST is the first end-to-end deep learning framework designed for this task. It adopts a conditional generative adversarial architecture, with a generator composed of four stages: feature extraction, fusion, LST reconstruction, and noise suppression. The first stage employs a set of encoders to extract multi-level latent representations from the inputs, which are then fused in the second stage using cosine similarity, normalization, and temporal attention mechanisms. The third stage decodes the fused features into high-resolution LST, followed by a Gaussian filter to suppress high-frequency noise. Training follows a weakly supervised strategy based on physical averaging principles and reinforced by a PatchGAN discriminator. Experiments demonstrate that WGAST outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to the best-performing baseline, on average, WGAST reduces RMSE by 17.18% and improves SSIM by 11.00%. Furthermore, WGAST is robust to cloud-induced LST and effectively captures fine-scale thermal patterns, as validated against 33 ground-based sensors. The code is available at https://github.com/Sofianebouaziz1/WGAST.git.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 8, 2025 2

Location-aware Adaptive Normalization: A Deep Learning Approach For Wildfire Danger Forecasting

Climate change is expected to intensify and increase extreme events in the weather cycle. Since this has a significant impact on various sectors of our life, recent works are concerned with identifying and predicting such extreme events from Earth observations. With respect to wildfire danger forecasting, previous deep learning approaches duplicate static variables along the time dimension and neglect the intrinsic differences between static and dynamic variables. Furthermore, most existing multi-branch architectures lose the interconnections between the branches during the feature learning stage. To address these issues, this paper proposes a 2D/3D two-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) with a Location-aware Adaptive Normalization layer (LOAN). Using LOAN as a building block, we can modulate the dynamic features conditional on their geographical locations. Thus, our approach considers feature properties as a unified yet compound 2D/3D model. Besides, we propose using the sinusoidal-based encoding of the day of the year to provide the model with explicit temporal information about the target day within the year. Our experimental results show a better performance of our approach than other baselines on the challenging FireCube dataset. The results show that location-aware adaptive feature normalization is a promising technique to learn the relation between dynamic variables and their geographic locations, which is highly relevant for areas where remote sensing data builds the basis for analysis. The source code is available at https://github.com/HakamShams/LOAN.

UniBonn Univerity of Bonn
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Dec 15, 2022

MANet: Fine-Tuning Segment Anything Model for Multimodal Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal remote sensing data, collected from a variety of sensors, provide a comprehensive and integrated perspective of the Earth's surface. By employing multimodal fusion techniques, semantic segmentation offers more detailed insights into geographic scenes compared to single-modality approaches. Building upon recent advancements in vision foundation models, particularly the Segment Anything Model (SAM), this study introduces a novel Multimodal Adapter-based Network (MANet) for multimodal remote sensing semantic segmentation. At the core of this approach is the development of a Multimodal Adapter (MMAdapter), which fine-tunes SAM's image encoder to effectively leverage the model's general knowledge for multimodal data. In addition, a pyramid-based Deep Fusion Module (DFM) is incorporated to further integrate high-level geographic features across multiple scales before decoding. This work not only introduces a novel network for multimodal fusion, but also demonstrates, for the first time, SAM's powerful generalization capabilities with Digital Surface Model (DSM) data. Experimental results on two well-established fine-resolution multimodal remote sensing datasets, ISPRS Vaihingen and ISPRS Potsdam, confirm that the proposed MANet significantly surpasses current models in the task of multimodal semantic segmentation. The source code for this work will be accessible at https://github.com/sstary/SSRS.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 14, 2024

Fuxi-DA: A Generalized Deep Learning Data Assimilation Framework for Assimilating Satellite Observations

Data assimilation (DA), as an indispensable component within contemporary Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems, plays a crucial role in generating the analysis that significantly impacts forecast performance. Nevertheless, the development of an efficient DA system poses significant challenges, particularly in establishing intricate relationships between the background data and the vast amount of multi-source observation data within limited time windows in operational settings. To address these challenges, researchers design complex pre-processing methods for each observation type, leveraging approximate modeling and the power of super-computing clusters to expedite solutions. The emergence of deep learning (DL) models has been a game-changer, offering unified multi-modal modeling, enhanced nonlinear representation capabilities, and superior parallelization. These advantages have spurred efforts to integrate DL models into various domains of weather modeling. Remarkably, DL models have shown promise in matching, even surpassing, the forecast accuracy of leading operational NWP models worldwide. This success motivates the exploration of DL-based DA frameworks tailored for weather forecasting models. In this study, we introduces FuxiDA, a generalized DL-based DA framework for assimilating satellite observations. By assimilating data from Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI) aboard Fengyun-4B, FuXi-DA consistently mitigates analysis errors and significantly improves forecast performance. Furthermore, through a series of single-observation experiments, Fuxi-DA has been validated against established atmospheric physics, demonstrating its consistency and reliability.

  • 6 authors
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Apr 12, 2024

GlacierCastAI: Predicting Glacier Retreat from Multi-Modal Satellite Imagery and Climate Signals

ERA5 seasonal climate variables contain predictive information about future glacier retreat beyond what satellite imagery alone provides, yet existing deep learning methods focus on mapping current boundaries rather than forecasting future ones. This paper presents GlacierCastAI, which reframes glacier boundary prediction as a multi-modal spatiotemporal forecasting problem, fusing multi-temporal Landsat imagery with ERA5 reanalysis climate variables and Copernicus DEM terrain features to forecast glacier boundaries across five glaciers spanning four climate regimes. The architecture couples a ResNet50 spatial encoder with a ConvLSTM temporal model and a cross-attention climate fusion module. Because forecasting is inherently more uncertain than mapping current boundaries, the reported IoU values (0.320-0.337) are not directly comparable to state-of-the-art mapping models. Comparisons are against traditional baselines and experimental conditions. Through a pre-registered ablation study, adding ERA5 climate signals improves image-only IoU from 0.326 to 0.337 (+3.4%), suggesting that atmospheric forcing carries predictive information beyond imagery alone. All deep learning models substantially outperform persistence and linear trend baselines (IoU 0.160 and 0.169 respectively), with improvements of 89-99% relative IoU. A lightweight climate-only MLP baseline (661K parameters) achieves an IoU of 0.320 (98% of image-only performance) using 85x fewer parameters, suggesting that ERA5 variables encode substantial predictive signal independently of satellite imagery. SHAP attribution analysis suggests that spring solar radiation (MAM) is the dominant climate driver, consistent with the known role of spring insolation in setting melt season trajectories.

  • 1 authors
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Jul 4

WADEPre: A Wavelet-based Decomposition Model for Extreme Precipitation Nowcasting with Multi-Scale Learning

The heavy-tailed nature of precipitation intensity impedes precise precipitation nowcasting. Standard models that optimize pixel-wise losses are prone to regression-to-the-mean bias, which blurs extreme values. Existing Fourier-based methods also lack the spatial localization needed to resolve transient convective cells. To overcome these intrinsic limitations, we propose WADEPre, a wavelet-based decomposition model for extreme precipitation that transitions the modeling into the wavelet domain. By leveraging the Discrete Wavelet Transform for explicit decomposition, WADEPre employs a dual-branch architecture: an Approximation Network to model stable, low-frequency advection, isolating deterministic trends from statistical bias, and a spatially localized Detail Network to capture high-frequency stochastic convection, resolving transient singularities and preserving sharp boundaries. A subsequent Refiner module then dynamically reconstructs these decoupled multi-scale components into the final high-fidelity forecast. To address optimization instability, we introduce a multi-scale curriculum learning strategy that progressively shifts supervision from coarse scales to fine-grained details. Extensive experiments on the SEVIR and Shanghai Radar datasets demonstrate that WADEPre achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding significant improvements in capturing extreme thresholds and maintaining structural fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/sonderlau/WADEPre.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 2