IBM has recently announced a new AI foundation model for a variety of weather and climate use cases, available in open source to the scientific, developer, and business communities. Developed by IBM and NASA, with contributions from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the model is claimed to offer a flexible, scalable way to address a variety of challenges related to short-term weather as well as long-term climate projection. 

Because of its unique design and training regime, the weather and climate foundation model can tackle far more applications than existing weather AI models, as outlined in a paper recently published on arXiv, "Prithvi WxC: Foundation Model for Weather and Climate." 

Key Applications & Model Capabilities 

Potential applications include creating targeted forecasts based on local observations, detecting and predicting severe weather patterns, improving the spatial resolution of global climate simulations, and improving how physical processes are represented in numerical weather and climate models. In one experiment in the above-identified paper, the foundation model accurately reconstructed global surface temperatures from a random sample of only five per cent of original data, suggesting a broader application to problems in data assimilation. 

This model was pre-trained on 40 years of Earth observation data from NASA's Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). As a foundation model, it has a unique architecture which allows it to be fine-tuned to global, regional, and local scales. This flexibility makes it suited for a range of weather studies. 

Transforming Climate Research with AI-Driven Models 

The foundation model is available for download on Hugging Face, along with two fine-tuned versions of the model that tackle specific scientific and industry-relevant applications. These are: 

• Climate and weather data downscaling: A common meteorological practice is downscaling—inferring high-resolution outputs from low-resolution variables. Typical data inputs include temperature, precipitation, and surface winds, all of which can have varied resolutions. The model can depict both weather and climate data at up to 12x resolution, generating localised forecasts and climate projections. The fine-tuned downscaling model is available on the IBM Granite page on Hugging Face. 
• Gravity wave parameterisation: Gravity waves are ubiquitous throughout the atmosphere and can affect many atmospheric processes related to climate and weather, such as cloud formation and aircraft turbulence. Traditionally, existing numerical climate models have not sufficiently captured gravity waves, leading to uncertainties regarding how exactly gravity waves can affect climate processes. This weather and climate foundation model can help scientists better estimate gravity wave generation, improve the accuracy of numerical weather and climate models and constrain uncertainty when simulating future weather and climate events. This gravity wave parameterisation model is being released as part of the NASA-IBM Prithvi family of models on Hugging Face. 

Revolutionising Climate Resilience 

"The NASA foundation model will help us produce a tool that people can use: weather, seasonal, and climate projections to help inform decisions on how to prepare, respond, and mitigate," says Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.  

"This space has seen the emergence of large AI models that focus on a fixed dataset and single use case — primarily forecasting. We have designed our weather and climate foundation model to go beyond such limitations so that it can be tuned to a variety of inputs and uses," said Juan Bernabe-Moreno, Director of IBM Research Europe (UK and Ireland) and IBM's Accelerated Discovery Lead for Climate and Sustainability. 

Arjun Shankar, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, emphasised, "Our collaboration with IBM and NASA to support the creation of the Prithvi weather and climate foundation model was a key part of our goal to bring advanced computing and data to problems of national importance, in this case, for weather and climate applications, which need continued computational science and model skill improvements to be impactful." 

This weather and climate model is part of a more significant collaboration between IBM Research and NASA to use AI technology to explore our planet and joins the Prithvi family of AI foundation models. Last year, IBM and NASA made the Prithvi geospatial AI foundation model the largest open-source geospatial AI model available on Hugging Face. This geospatial foundation model has since been used by governments, companies, and public institutions to examine changes in disaster patterns, biodiversity, land use, and other geophysical processes.  

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