Atmos-Bench: 3D Atmospheric Structures for Climate Insight
This work addresses the lack of a standardized 3D benchmark for atmospheric structure recovery, which is critical for climate understanding and weather forecasting, though it appears incremental in method.
The paper tackles the problem of recovering 3D atmospheric structures from satellite LiDAR data by introducing Atmos-Bench, a standardized benchmark, and FourCastX, a novel network that embeds physical constraints, achieving consistent improvements over state-of-the-art models without auxiliary inputs.
Atmospheric structure, represented by backscatter coefficients (BC) recovered from satellite LiDAR attenuated backscatter (ATB), provides a volumetric view of clouds, aerosols, and molecules, playing a critical role in human activities, climate understanding, and extreme weather forecasting. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary inputs and simplified physics-based approximations, and lack a standardized 3D benchmark for fair evaluation. However, such approaches may introduce additional uncertainties and insufficiently capture realistic radiative transfer and atmospheric scattering-absorption effects. To bridge these gaps, we present Atmos-Bench: the first 3D atmospheric benchmark, along with a novel FourCastX: Frequency-enhanced Spatio-Temporal Mixture-of-Experts Network that (a) generates 921,600 image slices from 3D scattering volumes simulated at 532 nm and 355 nm by coupling WRF with an enhanced COSP simulator over 384 land-ocean time steps, yielding high-quality voxel-wise references; (b) embeds ATB-BC physical constraints into the model architecture, promoting energy consistency during restoration; (c) achieves consistent improvements on the Atmos-Bench dataset across both 355 nm and 532 nm bands, outperforming state-of-the-art baseline models without relying on auxiliary inputs. Atmos-Bench establishes a new standard for satellite-based 3D atmospheric structure recovery and paves the way for deeper climate insight.