climate monitoring teams

Abstract: Weather reanalysis products rely on computationally intensive numerical weather predictions followed by data assimilation that corrects the forecast toward observations. Deep generative models offer a cheaper alternative that shifts much of this cost from inference to offline training. However, existing generative approaches have been evaluated on synthetic observations or under different datasets and evaluation schemes, making it unclear which design choices actually improve real-world data assimilation. We present the first controlled benchmark of generative weather data assimilation on real weather station observations. Using 11,849 NOAA MADIS stations across the contiguous United States and four weather variables, we evaluate methods while holding the dataset, observation operator, and deep learning architecture fixed. The benchmark compares the major design choices, including diffusion versus flow matching, pixel versus latent-space formulations, and multiple inference-time conditioning strategies, against a classical 3D-Var baseline. The benchmark reveals three clear conclusions. First, learned generative priors outperform the Gaussian prior of 3D-Var (35.7% vs. 33.3% RMSE reduction over ERA5) despite using no ERA5 background field at inference. Second, full-gradient guidance consistently outperforms stop-gradient and initial-noise optimization. Third, other choices provide little measurable benefit: diffusion and flow matching perform nearly identically under matched conditions, and latent-space variable mixing does not help. We further evaluate both dense and sparse station settings and find advantages from generative AI and full-gradient guidance more pronounced under sparsity. Together, these results identify which components of generative weather data assimilation improve performance on real station observations and establish a standardized benchmark for future work.

Abstract: Atmospheric observations are sparse, heterogeneous, and unevenly distributed, whereas many generative atmospheric models learn distributions over regularly gridded multivariate states. Once pretrained, diffusion models can supply atmospheric priors that can be combined with observation-derived likelihood factors in a Bayesian formulation. However, these observation sources differ substantially in geometry and sampling density, complicating the consistent use of their observations within a common inference framework. Here, we formulate this reconstruction problem as generative atmospheric super-resolution and introduce composable observation interfaces for conditioning a single pretrained 13-variable atmospheric diffusion model. The interfaces convert sparse radiosonde (R), clustered aircraft (A), and dense irregular surface-station (S) observations into source-specific likelihood factors that specify where observations constrain the gridded state, how residuals are counted under uneven sampling, and how strongly each source guides posterior sampling. We developed the aircraft and surface observation interfaces using 2019 observations and evaluated the selected interfaces throughout 2020 without further tuning. Compared with reconstructions conditioned only on radiosonde observations, the composed R+A+S interface reduces RMSE evaluated against ERA5 by $9.24\%$ across all 13 state variables over the CONUS domain. The aircraft and surface factors provide complementary improvements in upper-air and surface variables. The R+A+S combination also lowers the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), while evaluations at held-out aircraft and surface-station observations show reduced prediction errors. Together, these results demonstrate a modular route for conditioning a pretrained atmospheric generative prior on heterogeneous in situ observations without retraining the underlying model.

Abstract: Multi-modal multitasking models have shown strong performance on remote sensing datasets. However, because these models are trained on heterogeneous data and vary across tasks, designing a unified model that performs well in captioning, visual question answering (VQA), and visual grounding remains challenging. In this work, we evaluate several models on the VRS Bench and NWPU-VHR-10 datasets. The EarthMind model demonstrates strong results in both captioning and VQA. For grounding, we propose multiple pipelines - RemoteSAM-SAM-v1, RemoteSAM-SAM-v2, and DiffuSAM - and ultimately adopt a majority-voting ensemble across EarthMind, RemoteSAM, SAM3, Falcon, RemoteSAM-SAM3-v1, RemoteSAM-SAM3-v2, and DiffuSAM predictions. Our unified, modular pipeline integrates advanced SAM variants with multimodal LLMs to jointly perform captioning, VQA, and grounding. It achieves 82% accuracy on captioning and 83.32% on VQA, with 90.94%, 52.04%, and 92.06% for binary, numeric, and semantic question types respectively. For grounding, it attains 64.94% accuracy. By combining diverse VLMs with our custom RemoteSAM-SAM3 models through ensemble majority voting, the system delivers more accurate and consistent remote-sensing understanding than task-specific approaches.

Abstract: Greenhouse gas emissions estimates can be derived using inverse methods by combining atmospheric concentration observations with chemical transport models. The latter traditionally use physics-driven simulators such as Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Models (LPDMs), which are expensive to run and do not scale well to modern satellites' high resolution data. Previously we developed a performant atmospheric transport emulator that approximates LPDM outputs ("footprints") over South America ~1,000X faster than the UK Met Office's LPDM. Expanding towards global emulation is not straightforward, as atmospheric transport is regionally heterogeneous. This paper evaluates spatial transferability capabilities of models across four world regions: South America, East Asia, South Asia, North Africa using both region-specific and multi-region models, and leave-one-region-out experiments. Regional differences are characterised in the context of input variable and output footprint distributions. This work builds intuition in cross-region generalisation and transfer learning, aiding regional performance towards efficient global emissions estimates.