Anne Jones

S. Karthik Mukkavilli, Daniel Salles Civitarese, Johannes Schmude et al.

Machine learning and deep learning methods have been widely explored in understanding the chaotic behavior of the atmosphere and furthering weather forecasting. There has been increasing interest from technology companies, government institutions, and meteorological agencies in building digital twins of the Earth. Recent approaches using transformers, physics-informed machine learning, and graph neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on relatively narrow spatiotemporal scales and specific tasks. With the recent success of generative artificial intelligence (AI) using pre-trained transformers for language modeling and vision with prompt engineering and fine-tuning, we are now moving towards generalizable AI. In particular, we are witnessing the rise of AI foundation models that can perform competitively on multiple domain-specific downstream tasks. Despite this progress, we are still in the nascent stages of a generalizable AI model for global Earth system models, regional climate models, and mesoscale weather models. Here, we review current state-of-the-art AI approaches, primarily from transformer and operator learning literature in the context of meteorology. We provide our perspective on criteria for success towards a family of foundation models for nowcasting and forecasting weather and climate predictions. We also discuss how such models can perform competitively on downstream tasks such as downscaling (super-resolution), identifying conditions conducive to the occurrence of wildfires, and predicting consequential meteorological phenomena across various spatiotemporal scales such as hurricanes and atmospheric rivers. In particular, we examine current AI methodologies and contend they have matured enough to design and implement a weather foundation model.

Julian Kuehnert, Hiwot Tadesse, Chris Dearden et al.

Geospatial observations combined with computational models have become key to understanding the physical systems of our environment and enable the design of best practices to reduce societal harm. Cloud-based deployments help to scale up these modeling and AI workflows. Yet, for practitioners to make robust conclusions, model tuning and testing is crucial, a resource intensive process which involves the variation of model input variables. We have developed the Variational Exploration Module which facilitates the optimization and validation of modeling workflows deployed in the cloud by orchestrating workflow executions and using Bayesian and machine learning-based methods to analyze model behavior. User configurations allow the combination of diverse sampling strategies in multi-agent environments. The flexibility and robustness of the model-agnostic module is demonstrated using real-world applications.

Craig Mahlasi, Gciniwe S. Baloyi, Zaheed Gaffoor et al.

Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) are a fast-emerging paradigm for various geospatial tasks, such as ecological mapping. However, the utility of GFMs has not been fully explored for high-value use cases. This study aims to explore the utility, challenges and opportunities associated with the application of GFMs for ecological uses. In this regard, we fine-tune several pretrained AI models, namely, Prithvi-E0-2.0 and TerraMind, across three use cases, and compare this with a baseline ResNet-101 model. Firstly, we demonstrate TerraMind's LULC generation capabilities. Lastly, we explore the utility of the GFMs in forest functional trait mapping and peatlands detection. In all experiments, the GFMs outperform the baseline ResNet models. In general TerraMind marginally outperforms Prithvi. However, with additional modalities TerraMind significantly outperforms the baseline ResNet and Prithvi models. Nonetheless, consideration should be given to the divergence of input data from pretrained modalities. We note that these models would benefit from higher resolution and more accurate labels, especially for use cases where pixel-level dynamics need to be mapped.

Geoffrey Dawson, Remy Vandaele, Andrew Taylor et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Foundation models (FMs), pre-trained on massive unlabelled datasets, have the potential to drastically change AI applications in ocean science, where labelled data are often sparse and expensive to collect. In this work, we describe a new foundation model using the Prithvi-EO Vision Transformer architecture which has been pre-trained to reconstruct data from the Sentinel-3 Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI). We evaluate the model by fine-tuning on two downstream marine earth observation tasks. We first assess model performance compared to current baseline models used to quantify chlorophyll concentration. We then evaluate the FMs ability to refine remote sensing-based estimates of ocean primary production. Our results demonstrate the utility of self-trained FMs for marine monitoring, in particular for making use of small amounts of high quality labelled data and in capturing detailed spatial patterns of ocean colour whilst matching point observations. We conclude that this new generation of geospatial AI models has the potential to provide more robust, data-driven insights into ocean ecosystems and their role in global climate processes.