Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.00847

A Checklist to assess the energy and carbon impacts of ML/AI applications in Earth System Modeling

Filippo Dainelli·Amirpasha Mozaffari·Marina Castaño·Aina Gaya i Àvila·Lluís Palma Garcia·Alessio Melli·Oscar Dimdore Miles·Amanda Duarte
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

As machine learning and artificial intelligence find their way into nearly every aspect of climate, weather, and Earth system modeling, it is worth pausing to consider what our design decisions imply for the science and for the computational resources we consume. A growing body of literature addresses the ethical and sustainable development of ML/AI, yet translating these principles into day-to-day research practice remains a challenge as most of best practices are dispersed across multiple studies and commentaries. Here, we distill these discussions into a practical checklist that ML/AI and Earth system science practitioners can use to assess and reduce the environmental footprint of their own applications, organised around the successive stages of the model development pipeline. We complement the checklist with a selection of metrics drawn from the literature for estimating the energy consumption and carbon footprint of a project. For each question, we point to concrete examples and actionable suggestions from recent literature, aiming to bridge the gap between aspirational principles and the decisions researchers face at every stage of the development cycle.

Explore related subjects

physics.ao-phcs.AIcs.LG

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Filippo Dainelli, Amirpasha Mozaffari, Marina Castaño, Aina Gaya i Àvila, Lluís Palma Garcia, Alessio Melli, Oscar Dimdore Miles, Amanda Duarte. 2026-09-01. A Checklist to assess the energy and carbon impacts of ML/AI applications in Earth System Modeling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00847

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

Discover connections

cs.AI subjectcs.LG subjectphysics.ao-ph subject

Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Uncertainty-Aware End-to-End AI Weather Forecasting: Disentangling Observation and Model Contributions

End-to-end weather forecasting systems produce skillful global gridded and station forecasts directly from raw Earth observations, replacing the numerical weather prediction pipeline, including data assimilation, at a fraction of its cost. These systems are deterministic and issue no uncertainty. Here we render the Aardvark Weather model probabilistic by attaching one stochastic mechanism to each component: learned, input-dependent noise at the observation encoder, capturing aleatoric uncertainty inherited from the observing system, and Monte Carlo dropout in the processor, capturing epistemic uncertainty in the learned dynamics. The resulting nested ensemble attributes forecast spread to the two sources through a law-of-total-variance decomposition, cross-checked by withholding observation streams. Probabilistic finetuning significantly improves the mean forecast, by 4.2% on average across variables and lead times. The ensemble is calibrated against ERA5 through the medium range (spread-skill ratio 0.98), keeps station RMSE within 2.4% of the deterministic model while beating it in CRPS at every lead time, and trails the operational ECMWF ensemble. The encoder branch behaves as observation-driven uncertainty. Component-attributed uncertainty makes end-to-end forecasts more transparent, a step toward observation-driven digital twins of the atmosphere.

physics.ao-ph↗
arXiv2026

Diffusion-Based Refinement for Kilometer-Scale Probabilistic Precipitation Nowcasting

Localized extreme precipitation is a major trigger of urban flash floods and landslides, yet producing nowcasts that combine fine spatial detail with probabilistic uncertainty remains challenging. Here we introduce exPreCast-ENS, a conditional residual diffusion framework that transforms the deterministic 4 km radar nowcaster exPreCast into a 1 km probabilistic ensemble while correcting systematic forecast errors. Conditioning on both the forecast and preceding radar observations lets the ensemble-mean correct the baseline rather than perturb it, while members represent unresolved fine-scale variability. Over the Korean Peninsula, skill improves with ensemble size. In two high-impact events in 2023, a 30-member ensemble recovers 38-47% of heavy-rain pixels missed by exPreCast while retaining approximately 95% of its correct detections and alarming on under 1% of the pixels it correctly left clear. The method generates a 1-h forecast in 3.4 s on a single GPU and yields consistent improvements on the French regional MeteoNet radar dataset.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Emergent aggregation from collective foraging

Collective behaviour in living systems is usually modelled as the outcome of a \emph{direct} social drive: agents are rewarded, or hard-wired, to align with or approach their neighbours. Here we show that aggregation can instead emerge from an \emph{indirect} objective. We let reinforcement learning foragers, initially performing a random walk, optimize their dynamics from a purely individual reward for finding replenishable targets, while perceiving only their conspecifics and never the targets themselves. As the visual range grows, the agents undergo a sharp crossover from an environment-tuned individual search to a scale-agnostic collective one, and this crossover coincides with the onset of spatial aggregation. Thus a collective phase arises as a by-product of optimal foraging, without any direct reward for grouping. A minimal analytical first-passage model reproduces the transition as a crossover between the two search strategies. Our results identify indirect, resource-driven reward as a generic route to emergent collective phenomena.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗