Global atmospheric data assimilation with multi-modal masked autoencoders

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vandal, Thomas J., Duffy, Kate, McDuff, Daniel, Nachmany, Yoni, Hartshorn, Chris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Vandal, Thomas J.
Duffy, Kate
McDuff, Daniel
Nachmany, Yoni
Hartshorn, Chris
author_facet Vandal, Thomas J.
Duffy, Kate
McDuff, Daniel
Nachmany, Yoni
Hartshorn, Chris
contents Global data assimilation enables weather forecasting at all scales and provides valuable data for studying the Earth system. However, the computational demands of physics-based algorithms used in operational systems limits the volume and diversity of observations that are assimilated. Here, we present "EarthNet", a multi-modal foundation model for data assimilation that learns to predict a global gap-filled atmospheric state solely from satellite observations. EarthNet is trained as a masked autoencoder that ingests a 12 hour sequence of observations and learns to fill missing data from other sensors. We show that EarthNet performs a form of data assimilation producing a global 0.16 degree reanalysis dataset of 3D atmospheric temperature and humidity at a fraction of the time compared to operational systems. It is shown that the resulting reanalysis dataset reproduces climatology by evaluating a 1 hour forecast background state against observations. We also show that our 3D humidity predictions outperform MERRA-2 and ERA5 reanalyses by 10% to 60% between the middle troposphere and lower stratosphere (5 to 20 km altitude) and our 3D temperature and humidity are statistically equivalent to the Microwave integrated Retrieval System (MiRS) observations at nearly every level of the atmosphere. Our results indicate significant promise in using EarthNet for high-frequency data assimilation and global weather forecasting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_11696
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global atmospheric data assimilation with multi-modal masked autoencoders
Vandal, Thomas J.
Duffy, Kate
McDuff, Daniel
Nachmany, Yoni
Hartshorn, Chris
Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Global data assimilation enables weather forecasting at all scales and provides valuable data for studying the Earth system. However, the computational demands of physics-based algorithms used in operational systems limits the volume and diversity of observations that are assimilated. Here, we present "EarthNet", a multi-modal foundation model for data assimilation that learns to predict a global gap-filled atmospheric state solely from satellite observations. EarthNet is trained as a masked autoencoder that ingests a 12 hour sequence of observations and learns to fill missing data from other sensors. We show that EarthNet performs a form of data assimilation producing a global 0.16 degree reanalysis dataset of 3D atmospheric temperature and humidity at a fraction of the time compared to operational systems. It is shown that the resulting reanalysis dataset reproduces climatology by evaluating a 1 hour forecast background state against observations. We also show that our 3D humidity predictions outperform MERRA-2 and ERA5 reanalyses by 10% to 60% between the middle troposphere and lower stratosphere (5 to 20 km altitude) and our 3D temperature and humidity are statistically equivalent to the Microwave integrated Retrieval System (MiRS) observations at nearly every level of the atmosphere. Our results indicate significant promise in using EarthNet for high-frequency data assimilation and global weather forecasting.
title Global atmospheric data assimilation with multi-modal masked autoencoders
topic Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11696