Papers for
weather modelers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Distributed method merges fragmented data to find physical parameters accurately
Recovering Physical Parameters from Fragmented Observations via Exact Distributed Spline Merging
Abstract: Scientific measurements are frequently distributed across locations, time periods, and institutions. Combining such fragments into a continuous, differentiable field enables recovering governing physical parameters from its derivatives. This paper makes two contributions toward that goal. First, the established additive structure of fixed-basis ridge-regression statistics is applied to tensor-product spline fields: each data holder computes a local Gram matrix and moment vector, and the merged solution is mathematically identical to centralized fitting, with no raw data shared and no iterative synchronization. This property is specific to the fixed-feature squared-error setting; the present derivation does not establish an analogous guarantee for general jointly trained multilayer networks. Second, a complete pipeline connects distributed observations to physical parameter inference through field reconstruction, derivative extraction, and linear regression. The diffusion coefficient is recovered to 0.11% error and wave speed to 0.12% error; in both cases, distributed merging introduces zero degradation relative to centralized fitting. Application to 41 years of NOAA sea-surface temperature data confirms the result on real spatiotemporal observations.
Earth models test geometric data types for better predictions
Physically Typed and Geometry-Aware Representations for Earth Foundation Models
Abstract: Earth-observation (EO) foundation models have become exceptionally effective at learning se mantic, high-dimensional geospatial embeddings, while modern weather and climate models have demonstrated that Earth-specific geometry, spherical operators, meshes, and hybrid physical solvers can materially improve prediction. Yet these two advances are not equivalent. A conventional latent embedding has no inherent physical transformation law, whereas scalar fields, tangent polar-vector fields, axial/pseudovector quantities, covectors, and higher-order tensors transform differently under rotations, reflections, and changes of local coordinate frame. This proposal asks whether a general purpose Earth foundation model should preserve those distinctions explicitly, or whether standard embeddings plus augmentation already learn everything that matters. The central contribution is therefore not a more complicated architecture by assumption, but a staged falsification program. A compute-conscious ERA5 dry run first compares conventional, augmentation-matched, typed equivariant, and Hodge/Helmholtz variants under spatial, temporal, orientation, and low-data shifts. Only if explicit geometric typing yields reproducible improvements does the program advance toward a multimodal Earth foundation model in which semantic embeddings coexist with physically typed fields. The proposed gap is narrower and more defensible than claiming that current models ignore geometry entirely: several systems already respect spherical domain geometry, and emerging work explicitly learns scalar/vector fields on spheres. The unresolved question is whether foundation-scale, multimodal, parity-aware field typing produces practical gains beyond those existing approaches.