SamudrACE: Fast and Accurate Coupled Climate Modeling with 3D Ocean and Atmosphere Emulators
This work addresses the need for fast and accurate climate modeling for researchers and policymakers, representing an incremental adaptation of traditional coupling methods to machine learning emulators.
The paper tackles the challenge of simulating global climate by introducing SamudrACE, a coupled machine learning-based emulator that produces centuries-long simulations at high resolution with low climate biases and realistic variability in phenomena like ENSO.
Traditional numerical global climate models simulate the full Earth system by exchanging boundary conditions between separate simulators of the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, land surface, and other geophysical processes. This paradigm allows for distributed development of individual components within a common framework, unified by a coupler that handles translation between realms via spatial or temporal alignment and flux exchange. Following a similar approach adapted for machine learning-based emulators, we present SamudrACE: a coupled global climate model emulator which produces centuries-long simulations at 1-degree horizontal, 6-hourly atmospheric, and 5-daily oceanic resolution, with 145 2D fields spanning 8 atmospheric and 19 oceanic vertical levels, plus sea ice, surface, and top-of-atmosphere variables. SamudrACE is highly stable and has low climate biases comparable to those of its components with prescribed boundary forcing, with realistic variability in coupled climate phenomena such as ENSO that is not possible to simulate in uncoupled mode.