IBM and NASA Release Open-Source AI Model Offering Insights to Better Understand and Analyze Weather and Climate Data

IBM 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 offers 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." 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 percent 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.

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 localized forecasts and climate projections. The fine-tuned downscaling model is available on the IBM Granite page on Hugging Face.

• Gravity wave parameterization: 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, which leads to uncertainties in terms of how exactly gravity waves can affect climate processes. This weather and climate foundation model can help scientists better estimate gravity wave generation, to improve the accuracy of numerical weather and climate models and constrain uncertainty when simulating future weather and climate events. This gravity wave parameterization model is being released as part of the NASA-IBM Prithvi family of models on Hugging Face.

IBM has already collaborated with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) with a view to test the flexibility of the model with additional weather forecasting use cases. With the model, ECCC is exploring very short-term precipitation forecasts using a technique called precipitation nowcasting that ingests real-time radar data as input. The team is also testing the downscaling approach from global model forecasts at 15 km to km-scale resolution.

This weather and climate model is part of a larger 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. The foundation model and the gravity wave parameterization model can be accessed through the NASA-IBM Hugging Face page and the downscaling model can be accessed through the IBM Granite Hugging Face page.