Climate and weather prediction traditionally relies on complex numerical simulations of atmospheric physics. Deep learning approaches, such as transformers, have recently challenged the simulation paradigm with complex network forecasts. However, they often act as data-driven black-box models that neglect the underlying physics and lack uncertainty quantification. We address these limitations with ClimODE, a spatiotemporal continuous-time process that implements a key principle of advection from statistical mechanics , namely, weather changes due to a spatial movement of quantities over time. ClimODE models precise weather evolution with value-conserving dynamics, learning global weather transport as a neural flow, which also enables estimating the uncertainty in predictions . Our approach outperforms existing data-driven methods in global and regional forecasting with an order of magnitude smaller parameterization, establishing a new state of the art.
We model weather/climate as a spatiotemporal process u(x,t) = (u1(x,t),...,uK(x,t)) of K quantities as an advection PDE,
We model the flow velocity by parametrising it as a function of u(t)= {u(x,t) : x ∈ Ω }, spatial gradients ∇ u(t), current velocity v(t) and spatiotemporal embeddings ψ as,
To capture local and global effects pertaining to weather (or climate), we propose a hybrid network as,
The right plot shows model predictions u(x,t) of ground temperature (t2m) for a specific location while also including emission bias µ and variance σ . Remarkably, the model captures diurnal variations and effectively estimates variance .
The bottom plot highlights bias and variance on a global scale. Positive bias is evident around the Pacific ocean , corresponding to daytime, while a negative bias prevails around Europe and Africa, signifying nighttime. The uncertainties indicate confidence in ocean estimation, with northern land regions being challenging.
• Results for regional forecasting, longer-lead times of various quantities and comparison to baselines
• Abaltion to check the mass-conserving property of the ODE-system.
• Correlations among the data variables.
@inproceedings{
verma2024climode,
title={Clim{ODE}: Climate Forecasting With Physics-informed Neural {ODE}s},
author={Yogesh Verma and Markus Heinonen and Vikas Garg},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=xuY33XhEGR}
}