arXiv subjects

Milan Klöwer

Publications and source records attributed to Milan Klöwer.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A neural network-based Universal Thermal Climate Index for reliable global thermal-stress classification across extreme weather

Extreme temperatures are the leading cause of climate-related mortality world-wide. Climate-health research and operational weather forecasting require accurate estimates of human thermal stress. The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) is among the most sophisticated and widely used feels-like temperature metrics. However, its ubiquitous polynomial approximation does not generalize well to extreme weather conditions. Here, we introduce Neural-UTCI, a neural network that calculates UTCI with substantially higher accuracy across global conditions at a lower computational cost for operational use. Neural-UTCI reduces the polynomial approximation RMSE from 2.78°C to 0.36 °C, an 87% improvement, and lowers thermal stress misclassification rates from 5.3% to 1.7%, with consistent performance across resampling experiments. These differences affect thermal exposure metrics. For example, during the 2003 European heatwave summer in Rome, Italy, the number of very strong heat stress days increases from 15 to 35 days when using Neural-UTCI compared to operational products like ERA5-HEAT. Simultaneously, Neural-UTCI reliably classifies extreme cold stress conditions, allowing continuous global application. By improving UTCI accuracy, Neural-UTCI can strengthen climate-health risk assessments and public weather warning systems, especially as global warming increases the incidence of extreme events.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

How Do AI Climate Models Respond to Warming Across Climate Zones?

Regional climate zones are expected to shift under global warming. Whether AI climate models have learned to generalize climate-zone distributions under warming in a physically meaningful way affects their suitability for climate projection. We address this question by applying a Köppen-Geiger climate-zone decomposition to AIMIP Phase 1 models under prescribed +4K SST forcing and comparing their responses to physics-based AMIP models. Using this diagnostic, we compare baseline classification skill, per-zone responses in temperature, precipitation, and near-surface specific humidity, and the spatial structure of departures from physics-based models. All AI models considered reproduce the 1979-2014 ERA5 climatology within the physics-based models' range, but only the hybrid physics-AI model NeuralGCM-HRD reorganizes zones in agreement with established thermodynamic and hydrological scaling relations. The remaining emulators have distinct failure modes traceable to their architectural treatment of land cells. A physically consistent climate-zone response is therefore necessary for AI models intended for climate projection.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

Spatial Generalization Tests for Machine Learning-based Weather Models to Assess Physical Consistency

Machine learning-based weather prediction is revolutionizing weather forecasting by learning from weather data in present-day climate. However, generalization to other climates remains a major challenge. With melting sea ice, land-use change, and increasing ocean temperatures, boundary conditions are changing. Therefore, generalization in time depends on generalization in space. Here, we present three test cases to evaluate whether machine learning-based weather and climate models generalize in space and apply them to GraphCast and NeuralGCM. We reverse or rotate the planet in longitude or latitude under the model's coordinate system and adapt all boundary conditions and forcings accordingly. Physics-based general circulation models simulate a rotated/reversed planet with only rounding errors, but GraphCast and NeuralGCM fail these tests. The analyses furthermore revealed unphysical variable mappings based on correlation rather than causation. We argue that machine learning-based climate models should be designed to pass generalization tests to prevent overfitting on present-day regional climate.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2024

Harnessing the Power of Neural Operators with Automatically Encoded Conservation Laws

Neural operators (NOs) have emerged as effective tools for modeling complex physical systems in scientific machine learning. In NOs, a central characteristic is to learn the governing physical laws directly from data. In contrast to other machine learning applications, partial knowledge is often known a priori about the physical system at hand whereby quantities such as mass, energy and momentum are exactly conserved. Currently, NOs have to learn these conservation laws from data and can only approximately satisfy them due to finite training data and random noise. In this work, we introduce conservation law-encoded neural operators (clawNOs), a suite of NOs that endow inference with automatic satisfaction of such conservation laws. ClawNOs are built with a divergence-free prediction of the solution field, with which the continuity equation is automatically guaranteed. As a consequence, clawNOs are compliant with the most fundamental and ubiquitous conservation laws essential for correct physical consistency. As demonstrations, we consider a wide variety of scientific applications ranging from constitutive modeling of material deformation, incompressible fluid dynamics, to atmospheric simulation. ClawNOs significantly outperform the state-of-the-art NOs in learning efficacy, especially in small-data regimes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Neural General Circulation Models for Weather and Climate

General circulation models (GCMs) are the foundation of weather and climate prediction. GCMs are physics-based simulators which combine a numerical solver for large-scale dynamics with tuned representations for small-scale processes such as cloud formation. Recently, machine learning (ML) models trained on reanalysis data achieved comparable or better skill than GCMs for deterministic weather forecasting. However, these models have not demonstrated improved ensemble forecasts, or shown sufficient stability for long-term weather and climate simulations. Here we present the first GCM that combines a differentiable solver for atmospheric dynamics with ML components, and show that it can generate forecasts of deterministic weather, ensemble weather and climate on par with the best ML and physics-based methods. NeuralGCM is competitive with ML models for 1-10 day forecasts, and with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ensemble prediction for 1-15 day forecasts. With prescribed sea surface temperature, NeuralGCM can accurately track climate metrics such as global mean temperature for multiple decades, and climate forecasts with 140 km resolution exhibit emergent phenomena such as realistic frequency and trajectories of tropical cyclones. For both weather and climate, our approach offers orders of magnitude computational savings over conventional GCMs. Our results show that end-to-end deep learning is compatible with tasks performed by conventional GCMs, and can enhance the large-scale physical simulations that are essential for understanding and predicting the Earth system.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2023

Earth Virtualization Engines -- A Technical Perspective

Participants of the Berlin Summit on Earth Virtualization Engines (EVEs) discussed ideas and concepts to improve our ability to cope with climate change. EVEs aim to provide interactive and accessible climate simulations and data for a wide range of users. They combine high-resolution physics-based models with machine learning techniques to improve the fidelity, efficiency, and interpretability of climate projections. At their core, EVEs offer a federated data layer that enables simple and fast access to exabyte-sized climate data through simple interfaces. In this article, we summarize the technical challenges and opportunities for developing EVEs, and argue that they are essential for addressing the consequences of climate change.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2022

Productivity meets Performance: Julia on A64FX

The Fujitsu A64FX ARM-based processor is used in supercomputers such as Fugaku in Japan and Isambard 2 in the UK and provides an interesting combination of hardware features such as Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), and native support for reduced-precision floating-point arithmetic. The goal of this paper is to explore performance of the Julia programming language on the A64FX processor, with a particular focus on reduced precision. Here, we present a performance study on axpy to verify the compilation pipeline, demonstrating that Julia can match the performance of tuned libraries. Additionally, we investigate Message Passing Interface (MPI) scalability and throughput analysis on Fugaku showing next to no significant overheads of Julia of its MPI interface. To explore the usability of Julia to target various floating-point precisions, we present results of ShallowWaters.jl, a shallow water model that can be executed a various levels of precision. Even for such complex applications, Julia's type-flexible programming paradigm offers both, productivity and performance.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Climate Modelling in Low-Precision: Effects of both Deterministic & Stochastic Rounding

Motivated by recent advances in operational weather forecasting, we study the efficacy of low-precision arithmetic for climate simulations. We develop a framework to measure rounding error in a climate model which provides a stress-test for a low-precision version of the model, and we apply our method to a variety of models including the Lorenz system; a shallow water approximation for flow over a ridge; and a coarse resolution global atmospheric model with simplified parameterisations (SPEEDY). Although double precision (52 significant bits) is standard across operational climate models, in our experiments we find that single precision (23 sbits) is more than enough and that as low as half precision (10 sbits) is often sufficient. For example, SPEEDY can be run with 12 sbits across the entire code with negligible rounding error and this can be lowered to 10 sbits if very minor errors are accepted, amounting to less than 0.1 mm/6hr for the average grid-point precipitation, for example. Our test is based on the Wasserstein metric and this provides stringent non-parametric bounds on rounding error accounting for annual means as well as extreme weather events. In addition, by testing models using both round-to-nearest (RN) and stochastic rounding (SR) we find that SR can mitigate rounding error across a range of applications. Thus our results also provide evidence that SR could be relevant to next-generation climate models. While many studies have shown that low-precision arithmetic can be suitable on short-term weather forecasting timescales, our results give the first evidence that a similar low precision level can be suitable for climate.

physics.ao-ph↗