Observation Assimilation Transformer: Probabilistic Weather Analysis from Sparse Station Observations
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2610.00728v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Weather reanalysis products rely on computationally intensive numerical weather predictions followed by data assimilation that corrects the forecas...
The paper introduces STORM, a one‑stage generative AI framework that reformulates Earth system data assimilation as diffusion‑based Bayesian posterior sampling, replacing costly PDE ensemble forecasts with scalable AI inference. STORM employs a spatiotemporal transformer with a global‑attention algorithm that reduces computational complexity from quadratic to linear, enabling high‑resolution, long‑context modeling. The system scales to 74,400 GPUs on Frontier, achieving 96–99 % strong‑scaling efficiency and up to 6 ExaFLOPs sustained BF16 throughput, while supporting 32,768‑member ensembles for uncertainty quantification in just 34 seconds on 4,096 GPUs, and demonstrates improved hurricane tracking and climate reanalysis accuracy.
This study introduces the first controlled benchmark of generative models for weather data assimilation using real station observations from 11,849 NOAA MADIS stations across the U.S. It evaluates key design choices—diffusion vs. flow matching, pixel vs. latent-space formulations, and inference-time conditioning strategies—against a classical 3D-Var baseline. The benchmark finds that learned generative priors and full-gradient guidance improve RMSE over ERA5, while other design variations offer minimal benefit, especially under sparse observation conditions.
arXiv:2512. 03606v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate marine wind forecasts are essential for safe navigation, ship routing, and energy operations, yet they remain challenging because observations over the ocean are sparse, heterogeneous, and temporally variable.
The paper introduces a plug‑and‑play framework called Dynamics‑Precipitation Decoupling that employs a diffusion generator to convert non‑precipitation forecasts from a frozen weather model into observation‑aligned daily precipitation. The generator is conditioned on atmospheric states and satellite‑gauge precipitation estimates, using a multi‑scale recurrent encoder and cross‑attention to capture heterogeneous rainfall distributions and align daily accumulations with evolving atmospheric signals. Experiments on global and regional datasets, including a heavy‑rainfall case study in China, show that the method improves daily precipitation accuracy, event detection, and localized accumulation patterns compared to several baseline weather models and ensemble forecasts.
UniGIO is a generative framework that models global in‑situ weather dynamics directly from incomplete GIO data, unifying forecasting, imputation, and generation across arbitrary missing ratios. It employs an Observation Mixer, Event Aligner, Adaptive Temporal Mixer, and a Mixture‑of‑Experts structure to capture station‑level complementarity, temporal dependencies, and extreme events, refining outputs with a Local Refiner. Experiments on the Weather‑5K dataset show state‑of‑the‑art performance, improving accuracy, fidelity, and extreme event capture by 11%, 12%, and 5% respectively.