CRA5: Extreme Compression of ERA5 for Portable Global Climate and Weather Research via an Efficient Variational Transformer

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Hauptverfasser: Han, Tao, Chen, Zhenghao, Guo, Song, Xu, Wanghan, Bai, Lei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Han, Tao
Chen, Zhenghao
Guo, Song
Xu, Wanghan
Bai, Lei
author_facet Han, Tao
Chen, Zhenghao
Guo, Song
Xu, Wanghan
Bai, Lei
contents The advent of data-driven weather forecasting models, which learn from hundreds of terabytes (TB) of reanalysis data, has significantly advanced forecasting capabilities. However, the substantial costs associated with data storage and transmission present a major challenge for data providers and users, affecting resource-constrained researchers and limiting their accessibility to participate in AI-based meteorological research. To mitigate this issue, we introduce an efficient neural codec, the Variational Autoencoder Transformer (VAEformer), for extreme compression of climate data to significantly reduce data storage cost, making AI-based meteorological research portable to researchers. Our approach diverges from recent complex neural codecs by utilizing a low-complexity Auto-Encoder transformer. This encoder produces a quantized latent representation through variance inference, which reparameterizes the latent space as a Gaussian distribution. This method improves the estimation of distributions for cross-entropy coding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VAEformer outperforms existing state-of-the-art compression methods in the context of climate data. By applying our VAEformer, we compressed the most popular ERA5 climate dataset (226 TB) into a new dataset, CRA5 (0.7 TB). This translates to a compression ratio of over 300 while retaining the dataset's utility for accurate scientific analysis. Further, downstream experiments show that global weather forecasting models trained on the compact CRA5 dataset achieve forecasting accuracy comparable to the model trained on the original dataset. Code, the CRA5 dataset, and the pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/taohan10200/CRA5.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_03376
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CRA5: Extreme Compression of ERA5 for Portable Global Climate and Weather Research via an Efficient Variational Transformer
Han, Tao
Chen, Zhenghao
Guo, Song
Xu, Wanghan
Bai, Lei
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The advent of data-driven weather forecasting models, which learn from hundreds of terabytes (TB) of reanalysis data, has significantly advanced forecasting capabilities. However, the substantial costs associated with data storage and transmission present a major challenge for data providers and users, affecting resource-constrained researchers and limiting their accessibility to participate in AI-based meteorological research. To mitigate this issue, we introduce an efficient neural codec, the Variational Autoencoder Transformer (VAEformer), for extreme compression of climate data to significantly reduce data storage cost, making AI-based meteorological research portable to researchers. Our approach diverges from recent complex neural codecs by utilizing a low-complexity Auto-Encoder transformer. This encoder produces a quantized latent representation through variance inference, which reparameterizes the latent space as a Gaussian distribution. This method improves the estimation of distributions for cross-entropy coding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VAEformer outperforms existing state-of-the-art compression methods in the context of climate data. By applying our VAEformer, we compressed the most popular ERA5 climate dataset (226 TB) into a new dataset, CRA5 (0.7 TB). This translates to a compression ratio of over 300 while retaining the dataset's utility for accurate scientific analysis. Further, downstream experiments show that global weather forecasting models trained on the compact CRA5 dataset achieve forecasting accuracy comparable to the model trained on the original dataset. Code, the CRA5 dataset, and the pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/taohan10200/CRA5.
title CRA5: Extreme Compression of ERA5 for Portable Global Climate and Weather Research via an Efficient Variational Transformer
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03376