S2SServiceBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Last-Mile S2S Climate Services
This addresses the last-mile gap in climate services for decision-makers in domains like agriculture and disasters, but it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than solving the problem.
The authors tackled the problem of translating subseasonal-to-seasonal climate forecasts into actionable services by introducing S2SServiceBench, a multimodal benchmark with 500+ tasks across 10 service products, and found that state-of-the-art MLLMs and agents face persistent challenges in plot understanding and reasoning under uncertainty.
Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasts play an essential role in providing a decision-critical weeks-to-months planning window for climate resilience and sustainability, yet a growing bottleneck is the last-mile gap: translating scientific forecasts into trusted, actionable climate services, requiring reliable multimodal understanding and decision-facing reasoning under uncertainty. Meanwhile, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and corresponding agentic paradigms have made rapid progress in supporting various workflows, but it remains unclear whether they can reliably generate decision-making deliverables from operational service products (e.g., actionable signal comprehension, decision-making handoff, and decision analysis & planning) under uncertainty. We introduce S2SServiceBench, a multimodal benchmark for last-mile S2S climate services curated from an operational climate-service system to evaluate this capability. S2SServiceBenchcovers 10 service products with about 150+ expert-selected cases in total, spanning six application domains - Agriculture, Disasters, Energy, Finance, Health, and Shipping. Each case is instantiated at three service levels, yielding around 500 tasks and 1,000+ evaluation items across climate resilience and sustainability applications. Using S2SServiceBench, we benchmark state-of-the-art MLLMs and agents, and analyze performance across products and service levels, revealing persistent challenges in S2S service plot understanding and reasoning - namely, actionable signal comprehension, operationalizing uncertainty into executable handoffs, and stable, evidence-grounded analysis and planning for dynamic hazards-while offering actionable guidance for building future climate-service agents.