UniExtreme: A Universal Foundation Model for Extreme Weather Forecasting
This addresses the challenge of forecasting diversified extreme weather events for meteorology and disaster management, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of limited ability in deep learning foundation models to predict extreme weather events by proposing UniExtreme, which integrates adaptive frequency modulation and event prior augmentation modules, resulting in outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both extreme and general weather forecasting.
Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the development of Foundation Models (FMs) for weather forecasting, yet their ability to predict extreme weather events remains limited. Existing approaches either focus on general weather conditions or specialize in specific-type extremes, neglecting the real-world atmospheric patterns of diversified extreme events. In this work, we identify two key characteristics of extreme events: (1) the spectral disparity against normal weather regimes, and (2) the hierarchical drivers and geographic blending of diverse extremes. Along this line, we propose UniExtreme, a universal extreme weather forecasting foundation model that integrates (1) an Adaptive Frequency Modulation (AFM) module that captures region-wise spectral differences between normal and extreme weather, through learnable Beta-distribution filters and multi-granularity spectral aggregation, and (2) an Event Prior Augmentation (EPA) module which incorporates region-specific extreme event priors to resolve hierarchical extreme diversity and composite extreme schema, via a dual-level memory fusion network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniExtreme outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both extreme and general weather forecasting, showcasing superior adaptability across diverse extreme scenarios.