arXiv subjects

Nathaniel Cresswell-Clay

Publications and source records attributed to Nathaniel Cresswell-Clay.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DLESyM-Ocean: A Deep Learning Probabilistic Global Model for Simulating Present-Day Upper Ocean and Sea Ice

While AI has shown remarkable promise in atmospheric and meteorological forecasting, accurately simulating other components of the Earth system with AI remains an active frontier. We present DLESyM-Ocean, a Deep Learning Earth System Model that simulates global present-day sea ice and upper ocean conditions. Unlike conventional probabilistic models optimized via diffusion objectives or losses such as continuous-ranked probability score, DLESyM-Ocean is trained using a patch energy score loss. When driven by atmospheric forcing, DLESyM-Ocean produces a well-calibrated, spatially coherent, and skillful ensemble of sea ice and upper ocean conditions with minimal bias relative to reanalysis products. DLESyM-Ocean is stable when autoregressively run for multi-year simulations and produces a climatology and variability with minimal bias compared with reanalysis. We evaluate case studies including a recent sea ice extreme, a severe marine heatwave, the 2023 El Niño transition, and the 2023 spike in global mean temperature. In all of these case studies, DLESyM-Ocean produces realistic surface and subsurface trajectories and ample ensemble diversity in response to common atmospheric forcing, suggestive of learned autoregressive ocean dynamics. When coupled with other Earth system components, such as the atmosphere, the computational efficiency of DLESyM-Ocean makes it a promising tool for subseasonal to seasonal forecasting.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

AIMIP Phase 1: systematic evaluations of AI weather and climate models

We present the AI weather and climate model intercomparison project (AIMIP), phase 1. Drawing from the rich tradition of intercomparisons in climate model development, we specify a common experiment, output data format, and training constraints (namely, training against historical reanalysis data) for AIMIP Phase 1 models. We aim to identify differences in modeling frameworks and AI architectural choices that influence model behavior, and build trust in AI weather and climate models through open data and evaluation. AIMIP Phase 1 models must simulate the atmosphere given specified historical sea surface temperatures over 1979-2024. We evaluate the models' performance using five major evaluation criteria: biases, trends, response to El Niño-related sea surface temperature anomalies, temporal variability, and out-of-sample generalization tests. We find that the AI models are able to simulate the historical climate and response to forcing as well as a conventional physically-based model, but some AI models underestimate historical warming trends, and their predictions diverge in the out-of-sample generalization tests. We describe the AIMIP Phase 1 dataset that is publicly available for additional evaluations.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2025

Imposing the Fundamental Dynamical Constraint of Hydrostatic Balance to Improve Global ML Weather Prediction

Forecasting weather accurately and efficiently is a critical capability in our ability to adapt to climate change. Data driven approaches to this problem have enjoyed much success recently providing forecasts with accuracy comparable to physics based numerical prediction models but at significantly reduced computational expense. However, these models typically do not incorporate any physics priors. In this work, we demonstrate improved skill of data driven weather prediction approaches by incorporating physical constraints, specifically in the context of the DLWP model (Karlbauer et. al. 2024). Near hydrostatic balance, between the vertical pressure gradient and gravity, is one of the most fundamental and well satisfied constraints on atmospheric motions. We impose this balance through both hard and soft constraints, and demonstrate that the soft constraint improves the RMSE of many forecast fields, particularly at lead times beyond 7-10 days. The positive influence of hydrostatic balance is also clearly evident in improving the physicality and strength of a 10-day forecast for hurricane Irma. These results show that adding appropriate physical constraints can improve the skill and fidelity of data driven weather models in a way that does not impose any significant additional memory capacity or scalability challenges.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2025

A Deep Learning Earth System Model for Efficient Simulation of the Observed Climate

A key challenge for computationally intensive state-of-the-art Earth System models is to distinguish global warming signals from interannual variability. Here we introduce DLESyM, a parsimonious deep learning model that accurately simulates the Earth's current climate over 1000-year periods with no smoothing or drift. DLESyM simulations equal or exceed key metrics of seasonal and interannual variability--such as tropical cyclogenesis over the range of observed intensities, the cycle of the Indian Summer monsoon, and the climatology of mid-latitude blocking events--when compared to historical simulations from four leading models from the 6th Climate Model Intercomparison Project. DLESyM, trained on both historical reanalysis data and satellite observations, is an accurate, highly efficient model of the coupled Earth system, empowering long-range sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts while using a fraction of the energy and computational time required by traditional models.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2024

Advancing Parsimonious Deep Learning Weather Prediction using the HEALPix Mesh

We present a parsimonious deep learning weather prediction model to forecast seven atmospheric variables with 3-h time resolution for up to one-year lead times on a 110-km global mesh using the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix). In comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) machine learning (ML) weather forecast models, such as Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, our DLWP-HPX model uses coarser resolution and far fewer prognostic variables. Yet, at one-week lead times, its skill is only about one day behind both SOTA ML forecast models and the SOTA numerical weather prediction model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. We report several improvements in model design, including switching from the cubed sphere to the HEALPix mesh, inverting the channel depth of the U-Net, and introducing gated recurrent units (GRU) on each level of the U-Net hierarchy. The consistent east-west orientation of all cells on the HEALPix mesh facilitates the development of location-invariant convolution kernels that successfully propagate weather patterns across the globe without requiring separate kernels for the polar and equatorial faces of the cube sphere. Without any loss of spectral power after the first two days, the model can be unrolled autoregressively for hundreds of steps into the future to generate realistic states of the atmosphere that respect seasonal trends, as showcased in one-year simulations.

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arXiv2021

Sub-seasonal forecasting with a large ensemble of deep-learning weather prediction models

We present an ensemble prediction system using a Deep Learning Weather Prediction (DLWP) model that recursively predicts key atmospheric variables with six-hour time resolution. This model uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a cubed sphere grid to produce global forecasts. The approach is computationally efficient, requiring just three minutes on a single GPU to produce a 320-member set of six-week forecasts at 1.4° resolution. Ensemble spread is primarily produced by randomizing the CNN training process to create a set of 32 DLWP models with slightly different learned weights. Although our DLWP model does not forecast precipitation, it does forecast total column water vapor, and it gives a reasonable 4.5-day deterministic forecast of Hurricane Irma. In addition to simulating mid-latitude weather systems, it spontaneously generates tropical cyclones in a one-year free-running simulation. Averaged globally and over a two-year test set, the ensemble mean RMSE retains skill relative to climatology beyond two-weeks, with anomaly correlation coefficients remaining above 0.6 through six days. Our primary application is to subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecasting at lead times from two to six weeks. Current forecast systems have low skill in predicting one- or 2-week-average weather patterns at S2S time scales. The continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) and the ranked probability skill score (RPSS) show that the DLWP ensemble is only modestly inferior in performance to the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) S2S ensemble over land at lead times of 4 and 5-6 weeks. At shorter lead times, the ECMWF ensemble performs better than DLWP.

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