PDE foundation models are skillful AI weather emulators for the Martian atmosphere

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schmude, Johannes, Roy, Sujit, Wang, Liping, van Kessel, Theodore, Klein, Levente, Freitag, Marcus, Bentivegna, Eloisa, Manson-Sawko, Robert, Lutjens, Bjorn, Maskey, Manil, Watson, Campbell, Ramachandran, Rahul, Bernabe-Moreno, Juan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908836783194112
author Schmude, Johannes
Roy, Sujit
Wang, Liping
van Kessel, Theodore
Klein, Levente
Freitag, Marcus
Bentivegna, Eloisa
Manson-Sawko, Robert
Lutjens, Bjorn
Maskey, Manil
Watson, Campbell
Ramachandran, Rahul
Bernabe-Moreno, Juan
author_facet Schmude, Johannes
Roy, Sujit
Wang, Liping
van Kessel, Theodore
Klein, Levente
Freitag, Marcus
Bentivegna, Eloisa
Manson-Sawko, Robert
Lutjens, Bjorn
Maskey, Manil
Watson, Campbell
Ramachandran, Rahul
Bernabe-Moreno, Juan
contents We show that AI foundation models that are pretrained on numerical solutions to a diverse corpus of partial differential equations can be adapted and fine-tuned to obtain skillful predictive weather emulators for the Martian atmosphere. We base our work on the Poseidon PDE foundation model for two-dimensional systems. We develop a method to extend Poseidon from two to three dimensions while keeping the pretraining information. Moreover, we investigate the performance of the model in the presence of sparse initial conditions. Our results make use of four Martian years (approx.~34 GB) of training data and a median compute budget of 13 GPU hours. We find that the combination of pretraining and model extension yields a performance increase of 34.4\% on a held-out year. This shows that PDEs-FMs can not only approximate solutions to (other) PDEs but also anchor models for real-world problems with complex interactions that lack a sufficient amount of training data or a suitable compute budget.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_15004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PDE foundation models are skillful AI weather emulators for the Martian atmosphere
Schmude, Johannes
Roy, Sujit
Wang, Liping
van Kessel, Theodore
Klein, Levente
Freitag, Marcus
Bentivegna, Eloisa
Manson-Sawko, Robert
Lutjens, Bjorn
Maskey, Manil
Watson, Campbell
Ramachandran, Rahul
Bernabe-Moreno, Juan
Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
We show that AI foundation models that are pretrained on numerical solutions to a diverse corpus of partial differential equations can be adapted and fine-tuned to obtain skillful predictive weather emulators for the Martian atmosphere. We base our work on the Poseidon PDE foundation model for two-dimensional systems. We develop a method to extend Poseidon from two to three dimensions while keeping the pretraining information. Moreover, we investigate the performance of the model in the presence of sparse initial conditions. Our results make use of four Martian years (approx.~34 GB) of training data and a median compute budget of 13 GPU hours. We find that the combination of pretraining and model extension yields a performance increase of 34.4\% on a held-out year. This shows that PDEs-FMs can not only approximate solutions to (other) PDEs but also anchor models for real-world problems with complex interactions that lack a sufficient amount of training data or a suitable compute budget.
title PDE foundation models are skillful AI weather emulators for the Martian atmosphere
topic Machine Learning
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15004