Physics-Informed Teleconnection-Aware Transformer for Global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Forecasting
This addresses a critical problem for agricultural planning, energy management, and disaster preparedness by improving global S2S forecasting, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and physics-informed methods.
The paper tackled the challenging problem of subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasting by introducing TelePiT, a deep learning architecture that integrates physics and teleconnection awareness, resulting in significant outperformance over state-of-the-art baselines and operational systems across all forecast horizons.
Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasting, which predicts climate conditions from several weeks to months in advance, represents a critical frontier for agricultural planning, energy management, and disaster preparedness. However, it remains one of the most challenging problems in atmospheric science, due to the chaotic dynamics of atmospheric systems and complex interactions across multiple scales. Current approaches often fail to explicitly model underlying physical processes and teleconnections that are crucial at S2S timescales. We introduce \textbf{TelePiT}, a novel deep learning architecture that enhances global S2S forecasting through integrated multi-scale physics and teleconnection awareness. Our approach consists of three key components: (1) Spherical Harmonic Embedding, which accurately encodes global atmospheric variables onto spherical geometry; (2) Multi-Scale Physics-Informed Neural ODE, which explicitly captures atmospheric physical processes across multiple learnable frequency bands; (3) Teleconnection-Aware Transformer, which models critical global climate interactions through explicitly modeling teleconnection patterns into the self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{TelePiT} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven baselines and operational numerical weather prediction systems across all forecast horizons, marking a significant advance toward reliable S2S forecasting.