Yueya Wang

Haobo Li, Zhaowei Wang, Jiachen Wang et al.

Forecasting weather and climate events is crucial for making appropriate measures to mitigate environmental hazards and minimize losses. However, existing environmental forecasting research focuses narrowly on predicting numerical meteorological variables (e.g., temperature), neglecting the translation of these variables into actionable textual narratives of events and their consequences. To bridge this gap, we proposed Weather and Climate Event Forecasting (WCEF), a new task that leverages numerical meteorological raster data and textual event data to predict weather and climate events. This task is challenging to accomplish due to difficulties in aligning multimodal data and the lack of supervised datasets. To address these challenges, we present CLLMate, the first multimodal dataset for WCEF, using 26,156 environmental news articles aligned with ERA5 reanalysis data. We systematically benchmark 23 existing MLLMs on CLLMate, including closed-source, open-source, and our fine-tuned models. Our experiments reveal the advantages and limitations of existing MLLMs and the value of CLLMate for the training and benchmarking of the WCEF task.

Haobo Li, Eunseo Jung, Zixin Chen et al.

Multimodal time series forecasting is foundational in various fields, such as utilizing satellite imagery and numerical data for predicting typhoons in climate science. However, existing multimodal approaches primarily focus on utilizing text data to help time series forecasting, leaving the visual data in existing time series datasets untouched. Furthermore, it is challenging for models to effectively capture the physical information embedded in visual data, such as satellite imagery's temporal and geospatial context, which extends beyond images themselves. To address this gap, we propose physics-informed positional encoding (PIPE), a lightweight method that embeds physical information into vision language models (VLMs). PIPE introduces two key innovations: (1) a physics-informed positional indexing scheme for mapping physics to positional IDs, and (2) a variant-frequency positional encoding mechanism for encoding frequency information of physical variables and sequential order of tokens within the embedding space. By preserving both the physical information and sequential order information, PIPE significantly improves multimodal alignment and forecasting accuracy. Through the experiments on the most representative and the largest open-sourced satellite image dataset, PIPE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both deep learning forecasting and climate domain methods, demonstrating superiority across benchmarks, including a 12% improvement in typhoon intensity forecasting over prior works. Our code is provided in the supplementary material.