Aircast-Mars: A Mars Foundation Model for Global Weather Forecasting with HEALPix-Aware Convolutions
Foundation models for planetary atmospheres promise fast, lightweight surrogates of expensive general circulation models (GCMs) for mission planning and scientific inquiry. Here we present Aircast-Mars, a deep-learning weather prediction system for Mars trained on the Ensemble Mars Atmosphere Reanalysis System (EMARS) v1.0. We regrid temperature, zonal wind, and meridional wind fields across 28 vertical levels onto a hierarchical equal-area isolatitude pixelization (HEALPix) mesh at Nside = 64 (~110 km resolution) and train a HEALPix-aware 2D U-Net inspired by the DLESyM architecture to predict the next hourly atmospheric state. The model employs custom inter-face padding that respects the topology of the 12-face HEALPix sphere and modern ConvNeXt residual blocks with capped Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) activations. While containing 4.3 million trainable parameters, a compact size compared to terrestrial weather foundation models, the network achieves a best validation Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 1.58e-5 in normalized units. Recursive autoregressive rollouts remain stable and physically coherent for 25 hours (one Martian sol), with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) growing monotonically from ~0.004 at t + 1 h to ~0.031 at t + 25 h without divergence. Compared to a baseline 3D U-Net, the HEALPix-aware architecture reduces validation loss by more than an order of magnitude while using fewer parameters. The model generates a one-hour forecast in approximately 0.5 seconds on a single GPU, offering several orders-of-magnitude speedup over traditional numerical GCMs. These results demonstrate that parsimonious, geometry-respecting neural architectures can capture synoptic-scale Martian atmospheric dynamics and provide a foundation for planetary-scale weather forecasting.