Era5 Reanalysis Data

Momentum

3 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jul 6Week of Sep 21

Latest papers 23

Oct 1, 2026physics.ao-ph

Varda-single-1.0: deterministic data-driven weather forecasting at 1 km resolution over Switzerland's complex topography

We present Varda-single-1.0, a medium-range data-driven weather prediction system built for the Alpine domain. It provides hourly deterministic regional forecasts on a mesh of 1 km resolution and global forecasts on a 31 km mesh. The system comprises two independently trained stretched-grid Graph Transformer models with encoder-processor-decoder architecture, developed in the Anemoi framework: a 6-hourly autoregressive forecaster and a temporal downscaler reconstructing hourly forecasts between the forecaster's steps. Its training curriculum includes pre-training on ERA5 reanalysis data, followed by training on a 20-year kilometre-scale regional reanalysis, and finally fine-tuning on operational kilometre-scale analyses. Verified over one year against operational analyses and surface station observations, Varda-single is competitive with or improves on MeteoSwiss' operational numerical weather prediction baselines for most headline scores and variables. It broadly matches the skill of the high-resolution 1 km ICON-CH1-EPS control at lead times up to +33 h and generally outperforms the 2 km ICON-CH2-EPS control at lead times up to +120 h. Despite competitive aggregate scores, Varda-single underestimates some local wind maxima and produces overly smooth convective precipitation fields, consistent with the smoothing associated with squared-error training. To gain insight into the model's behaviour, we investigate three case studies beyond the aggregated headline scores, and find particular weaknesses in Varda-single's representation of local winds over complex terrain. Varda-single represents an important step in the development of high-resolution ML forecasting over complex terrain, in complementing the operational regional numerical weather prediction models of MeteoSwiss with data-driven models and in providing a pretrained model for researchers and user-specific applications.
Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

Benchmarking Generative Models for Weather Data Assimilation on Real Station Observations

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.
Sep 28, 2026cs.SE

Graph-Based Learning for Multi-Horizon Martian Atmospheric Forecasting

Martian weather forecasting is important for future exploration, but atmospheric behaviour on Mars combines spatial, temporal, vertical, and dust-driven processes in ways that challenge current modelling and forecasting approaches. This paper introduces MaGMA (Martian Graph-based Multi-horizon Atmospheric Forecasting), a graph-based data engineering framework that transforms OpenMARS reanalysis fields into structured learning objects for Martian atmospheric forecasting. Local atmospheric patches are represented as graph nodes and linked through spatial neighbourhoods, temporal continuity, longer temporal dependencies, and dynamically similar atmospheric states. The model integrates recent atmospheric history, engineered physical descriptors, and vertical atmospheric information to support forecasting across multiple horizons. We evaluate MaGMA across five unseen Martian years, including regular years and a global dust storm year. In regular years, the model achieves overall R^2 values of approximately 0.73-0.85. For dust-column forecasting, it outperforms classical and deep temporal baselines in most year-horizon comparisons. During the global dust storm year, dust-column prediction remains strong at shorter horizons, with R^2 above 0.8 for the first two horizons, while broader multivariate performance declines. The results show that graph-based data engineering can create reusable and diagnostically useful representations for planetary atmospheric forecasting, while highlighting the need for better learning under rare extreme regimes and improved use of vertical atmospheric structure.
Sep 16, 2026cs.LG

Every Fixed Metric Has a Blind Spot: A Learned Atmospheric Critic for Scoring Forecast Realism

Despite their high accuracy on point-wise metrics, machine learning weather forecasting models can exhibit different failure modes such as blurring, periodic irregularities, and other unphysical spatial artifacts. This has motivated a variety of metrics to detect known failure cases. Existing metrics fix a representation or transformation in advance, and that choice limits the artifacts they can detect. We propose to train a discriminator for separating reference data from the model's output, and using its output logit to obtain a divergence-like realism score. The discriminator learns whatever separates the model's fields from real weather, adapting to whichever failure mode that model exhibits. We compare our learned atmospheric critic to existing metrics using various synthetic corruptions applied to ERA5 reanalysis data. Our method successfully identifies the corruptions and ranks their severity, while existing metrics fail on at least one corruption. Additionally, we evaluate forecasts from real weather models, and find that the realism score degrades with longer lead times and the metric generally assigns higher realism to numerical models than to machine learning models.
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

From Nowcasting to Forecasting: Adapting a Reanalysis-Trained

Accurate cloud-cover forecasts are important for temperature prediction, radiation forecasting, and solar-power operations. Short-range forecasting methods can preserve observed cloud placement during the first forecast hours, but their skill decreases when cloud fields evolve through formation, dissipation and deformation. Longer lead times require accounting for atmospheric evolution, but operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts may not accurately represent the satellite-observed cloud state at initialization. We develop CloudCast v2, a machine-learning model for 12-hour cloud-cover forecasting from observation-based initial conditions. The model is first trained on the Copernicus European Regional Reanalysis (Ridal2024) to learn cloud-evolution dynamics, and is then adapted to satellite-derived cloud fields using conditional flow matching (Lipman2023), a generative method that transforms noise into cloud-cover forecasts conditioned on the observed initial cloud fields and NWP inputs. CloudCast v2 reduces mean absolute error by 10% relative to its predecessor, CloudCast v1 (Partio2025), over the 1-12 h range. It also overtakes CloudCast v1 in fractions skill score, a neighborhood-based measure of spatial agreement, after approximately 3-6 h, depending on the cloudiness category. These results show that observation-initialized machine-learning forecasts can extend beyond the usual 1-3-hour nowcasting range while retaining spatial detail from satellite cloud fields.
Sep 2, 2026physics.ao-ph

Improving global precipitation forecasts with an AI weather model trained on satellite observations

Precipitation forecasts shape decision-making across the global economy, particularly in sectors such as agriculture. However, unlike variables such as temperature, precipitation is highly intermittent and localized, making it difficult to forecast. While recent advances in AI weather prediction systems have enabled them to surpass physical models on globally averaged metrics, improvements in mean error rarely translate to actionable forecasts of severe flooding or dry crop fields. Furthermore, most of these models are trained and evaluated against a reanalysis data product, ERA5, which has well-known biases. Here we retrain AIFS, ECMWF's widely-used, open-source operational 0.25° probabilistic graph-transformer weather model, on satellite-based precipitation observations. Our model, Laxmi, improves global probabilistic accuracy by 19% and resolves systematic distributional biases in ERA5. Specifically, Laxmi reduces drizzle overprediction by 33% for amounts less than 3 mm per day. It also mitigates extreme rainfall underprediction, improving the global 95th percentile Brier skill score by 57%. Across a case study of 10 Indian tropical storms, Laxmi delivered the most accurate forecast of 150 mm event-total precipitation in 7 events, compared to 1 for AIFS and 2 for the leading physical model, IFS. Our results demonstrate that incorporating observation-based precipitation data directly into training can substantially improve forecasts.
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Earth observation embeddings are effective sub-grid descriptors for probabilistic weather downscaling

Global weather reanalyses and forecasts resolve the evolving atmospheric state on coarse grids, but site-specific applications require predictions at arbitrary locations where near-surface conditions also depend on unresolved terrain and land-surface properties. Existing probabilistic downscalers address this gap using hand-crafted topographic and surface descriptors. We ask instead whether Earth observation foundation models can provide transferable subgrid surface representations for probabilistic weather downscaling. We augment a convolutional conditional neural process (ConvCNP) that downscales coarse ERA5 reanalysis fields at ~25 km resolution with a learned local surface descriptor, obtained by compressing a patch of TESSERA embeddings at 10 m resolution. Although these embeddings summarize annual surface conditions, they improve downscaling by encoding persistent surface properties that capture a location's departure from the coarse-grid atmospheric state. Across five climatically diverse regions, the embedding improves point and probabilistic skill at stations held out in both space and time, overall improving CRPS skill by 11.5% for 2 m temperature and 6.2% for 10 m wind speed relative to a topography-only ConvCNP baseline. A hand-crafted descriptor incorporating richer surface information than topography alone captures comparable persistent subgrid signal but yields far smaller predictive gains than the learned embedding representation. These improvements persist when forecasts from the Aurora AI model replace ERA5 reanalysis fields and when predicting at newly deployed weather station networks. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that long-timescale Earth observation embeddings can support short-timescale weather downscaling where subgrid departures are systematically structured by persistent surface properties.
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

Multimodal Spatiotemporal Atmospheric Data Assimilation with Latent Video Flow-matching

Data assimilation (DA) uses Bayesian inference to update the state of a numerical forecast model with observed data. In this study, we propose a fundamentally different, unified approach to atmospheric data assimilation. We use latent video flow-matching to sample temporally consistent trajectories from a prior trained using ERA5 reanalysis (69 variables over an 8-day window). We also use posterior sampling to assimilate real observation sources, such as those from the NOAA Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive and the Integrated Surface Database. Because the prior generates a continuous trajectory, it naturally propagates information between observed and unobserved frames. Therefore, we can perform various DA tasks, such as filtering and smoothing, simply by changing the observed frames. Moreover, we generate full-state ensemble forecasts directly from sparse observations, achieving performance competitive with state-of-the-art observation-to-forecast models.
Jul 30, 2026physics.ao-ph

Rescene: band-limited stochastic forcing turns a frozen neural weather operator into a climate emulator

Over the past few years, the rapid development of machine learning (ML) models for weather forecasting has produced deterministic models whose medium-range skill matches or exceeds that of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)'s high-resolution forecast (HRES). However, when these models are integrated freely beyond the horizon they were trained for, they blow up, drift, or lose their seasonal cycle, and retraining them for stability is expensive. We therefore ask what can be recovered from a strictly frozen backbone. We present Rescene, a 0.4 M-parameter wrapper around a frozen 1.5 degree, 6-hourly vision-transformer operator, developed using ERA5 reanalysis data and comprising a deterministic "slow clock" (0.33 M) that blends the forecast toward a lead-aware day-of-year climatology and a generative head (0.06 M) that adds a spectrally shaped stochastic perturbation at every step. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the deterministic wrapper alone is stable for decades but collapses daily variability to 40% of ERA5. Adding the generative head restores 126% (Z500) and 130% (MSLP) of the observed daily variability with pattern correlations of 0.89 and 0.92, recovers 82% of the observed blocking frequency, keeps the ensemble calibrated (spread-skill ratio 0.78-0.97 from day 7 to day 90), and integrates for 100 years with no detectable drift (+0.008 +/- 0.014 K per century). Moreover, because the perturbation is band-limited to total wavenumber k≤20k \le 20, the small scales are never forced, yet realistic k≥20k \ge 20 power is sustained: a direct decomposition of the 6-hourly energy budget shows that the frozen operator supplies 28 times more energy than the perturbation at k≥40k \ge 40, with a fractional growth rate 247 times larger at the grid scale than at planetary scales.
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Benchmarking ConvLSTM for One-Day-Ahead IMDAA Rainfall-Field Prediction across Four Indian Cities

Convolutional long short-term memory networks (ConvLSTMs) are widely used for precipitation forecasting, but most evidence for their performance comes from dense, high-frequency radar sequences. This study tests whether convolutional recurrence improves one-day-ahead rainfall-field prediction on small daily reanalysis grids. Indian Monsoon Data Assimilation and Analysis (IMDAA) fields for June-September 1998-2020 were analysed for Bengaluru, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Ten naive, statistical, tree-based and neural approaches were compared using atmospheric-only and rainfall-history-plus-atmospheric inputs. Performance was assessed for complete fields, domain-mean rainfall, spatial anomalies and high-rainfall days. ConvLSTM did not consistently outperform simpler alternatives. FC-LSTM produced the numerically lowest domain-mean rainfall error in Bengaluru, Kolkata and Mumbai, whereas persistence performed best in Delhi. ConvLSTM produced the numerically lowest spatial-anomaly error only in Mumbai, where rainfall fields showed greater short-term spatial continuity and rainfall-history inputs improved all three neural architectures. The difference between ConvLSTM and FC-LSTM was nevertheless small. Neural models underestimated rainfall magnitude and predicted too few threshold exceedances on high-rainfall days, while persistence achieved the highest detection performance in every city. Post-hoc analyses showed that the selected models were most sensitive to the latest input day, with broader recent-lag sensitivity in Mumbai. These findings show that gridded inputs alone do not justify ConvLSTM and that architecture choice should follow strong benchmarking across average, spatial and high-rainfall performance.
Jul 28, 2026physics.geo-ph

A Spatial Persistence Gradient in European Warming Consistent with North Atlantic Cold-Blob Influence

Europe is warming faster than the global mean, yet the spatial organisation of this acceleration remains incompletely understood. Using ERA5 reanalysis for 1950--2024 across 28 IPCC AR6 European sub-regions, we identify two connected empirical results. First, the DFA1 Hurst exponent of interannual temperature residuals is strongly and negatively associated with the 1996--2024 warming rate (r=−0.792r=-0.792, p=5.1×10−7p=5.1\times10^{-7}). High-persistence, mainly Atlantic-proximal regions warm more slowly, whereas low-persistence continental regions warm faster. This relationship is robust to five residualisation schemes, three memory estimators, leave-one-region-out analysis, and five null-test families, including spatial block permutation. It also persists across warming windows (r=−0.550r=-0.550 for 1981--2024, −0.792-0.792 for 1996--2024, and −0.875-0.875 for 2000--2024), but vanishes under DFA2, indicating that the signal lies in low-frequency interannual-to-decadal persistence rather than trend curvature. The pattern is consistent with, but does not prove, North Atlantic cold-blob and thermohaline influence on European land temperatures. Second, under a strict 2006--2024 holdout, contemporaneous Mediterranean SST reduces mean annual temperature RMSE by 43% (from 0.7870.787 to 0.449,∘C0.449,^{\circ}\mathrm{C}). A causal lag-weight predictor based on prior-year Mediterranean and Atlantic SST also outperforms AR(2) (0.5780.578 versus 0.695,∘C0.695,^{\circ}\mathrm{C}) and remains informative after removing NAO, AO, and PNA effects. Similar skill from five-year moving-average and exponentially weighted predictors shows that short Mediterranean SST persistence at 1--5-year lags is the key predictive ingredient. Together, the results support a two-regime interpretation: Atlantic-proximal regions exhibit stronger memory and oceanic buffering, while continental interiors show faster warming and weaker interannual persistence.
Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Probing Geospatial SSL Representations with Environmental Signals

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is designed to learn generic, transferable representations rather than representations optimized for a single task. Most geospatial benchmarks evaluate representations solely through downstream tasks, providing limited insight into the information encoded within the representation itself. We ask a different question: do SSL representations of satellite imagery preserve statistical associations with environmental variables that co-vary with the imaging process? To answer this question, we probe SSL representations using co-located ERA5 reanalysis variables, a global dataset of physically consistent environmental variables, including temperature, precipitation, surface solar radiation, surface pressure, and volumetric soil water. These variables are physically related to the spectral reflectance and radar backscatter recorded by Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, making them meaningful evaluation targets despite not being used during SSL pretraining. We complement this probing analysis with intrinsic representation metrics to characterize representation geometry and investigate how these properties relate to downstream performance and the encoding of environmental signals. Using DINO, MAE, and MoCo models trained under identical conditions, we show that representation-level metrics distinguish models with similar downstream benchmark performance, providing complementary information beyond task-driven benchmarks. We further find that the linear accessibility of environmental signals is associated with performance on environmentally dependent tasks in the PANGAEA benchmark. Finally, we release ERA5 annotations co-located with the SSL4EO dataset to enable physically grounded representation evaluation for future geospatial foundation models.
Jul 3, 2026cs.DB

STRATOS: Bridging the Symbolic-to-Numeric Gap in Spatio-Temporal Text-to-SQL for Meteorological Data

Copernicus, the European Union's Earth observation program, produces petabytes of Earth observation and climate data, offering immense potential for research, policy, and applications. However, access to these datasets requires advanced programming skills and familiarity with domain-specific formats such as NetCDF or GRIB. Moreover, general-purpose Text-to-SQL systems fail when applied naively to the meteorological domain due to a profound ``Symbolic-to-Numeric'' gap. To overcome these limitations, we present an end-to-end Text-to-SQL framework specifically engineered for real-world, scalable meteorological data exploration. Our system intercepts natural language to resolve spatial and semantic ambiguities \textit{before} SQL generation. We design STRATOS, a Spatio-Temporal Resolution Agent for Text-to-SQL to dynamically bridge the symbolic-to-numeric gap by mapping fuzzy concepts to a localized ontology and resolving spatial entities via external knowledge bases. Further, our complexity-aware query rewriter rewrites expensive spatial predicates, reducing execution times from hours to seconds. Last, we introduce the STRATOS Evaluation Workload, comprising 7,520 complex query pairs explicitly designed by domain experts to test scalability and symbolic-to-numeric translation across challenging spatio-temporal dimensions previously unexplored by Text-to-SQL systems.
Jul 3, 2026cs.LG

From Global to Local: Efficient Regional Weather Downscaling with Global Weather Foundation Model

Accurate regional weather prediction requires resolving fine-scale structure while remaining consistent with global dynamics. Traditional limited area models rely on computationally expensive simulations, while many learning-based approaches frame the problem as super-resolution, overlooking statistical and physical mismatches across scales. We propose a foundation-model-driven downscaling framework that learns regional refinements of global forecasts by augmenting a pretrained weather model backbone with lightweight, multi-scale prediction heads operating directly in its latent space. Despite being trained on substantially coarser inputs, the pretrained backbone supports regional adaptation at resolutions corresponding to a two-order-of-magnitude increase in grid-cell resolution, without the need for retraining. The proposed approach uses regional numerical simulations as training targets and is evaluated not only against gridded datasets but also against ground-based weather station observations, enabling analysis of systematic biases between global reanalysis, regional simulations, and in-situ weather station observations. Our experiments show improved accuracy in comparison to NWP on most of the metrics at the fraction of computational cost. Moreover, we observe that building on a latent space of globally pre-trained weather foundation model offers better downscaling capabilities than the standard image-based super-resolution approaches.
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

Otter Weather: Skillful and Computationally Efficient Medium-Range Weather Forecasting

State-of-the-art medium-range AI weather models can outperform traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) but require massive training budgets. This restricts usage for under-resourced groups and severely limits fast model iteration. Here we develop Otter Weather, a highly efficient spatiotemporal forecasting model designed to democratise high-performance weather prediction with AI. Evaluated on ERA5 reanalysis data at 1.5° resolution using standard WeatherBench protocols, the Otter family significantly advances the skill-compute Pareto frontier. The deterministic version outperforms the best NWP baseline by 9.6% at a 24-hour lead time while requiring fewer than 3.5 A100-days for training. It provides a 2x efficiency gain over lightweight AI models and a 100-fold reduction in compute compared to resource-intensive frontier architectures. We extend these efficiency gains into probabilistic forecasting by training via the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). Scaling to a larger architecture, Otter-XL achieves a 9.7% CRPS improvement over the IFS ENS baseline. This yields an almost two-fold increase in predictive skill over comparable lightweight models at similar compute budgets. Otter-XL also outperforms frontier architectures like GenCast by over 2%, while using an order of magnitude less compute. Finally, Otter is applied out-of-the-box to a complex acoustic scattering PDE task where it outperforms a state-of-the-art foundation modelling approach, suggesting that the advances made here might apply across a range of scientific domains.
Jun 19, 2026astro-ph.EP

ARCO-Mars: A Unified Cloud-Optimized Archive of Mars Atmosphere Reanalysis

Long-term records of the Martian atmosphere based on general circulation models and reanalysis of atmospheric state variables are important to understand the diurnal, seasonal, and climatological changes of the planet. Atmospheric dynamics of the Martian atmosphere are strongly influenced by the characterization of dust lifting, solar insolation, and spatial variations in topography. We present ARCO-Mars, a unified Analysis-Ready Cloud-Optimized dataset providing integrated access to three independent Mars atmospheric reanalysis products: EMARS, MACDA, and OpenMARS spanning over Mars Years 24-35. These reanalyses assimilate thermal infrared retrievals from the MGS/TES, ODY/THEMIS, and MRO/MCS instruments, providing both two and three-dimensional surface and atmospheric state variables, including temperature, winds, surface pressure, and dust optical depth. The dataset is stored in Zarr v3 format and hosted on HuggingFace, enabling efficient cloud-based access without requiring local storage of the full archive. We compare the state variables between the three reanalysis products to identify systematic differences, attributed to differences in data assimilation and general circulation models. ARCO-Mars provides a community resource for Mars atmospheric science, numerical weather prediction validation, and machine learning applications, including weather forecasting and data assimilation.
Jun 18, 2026eess.IV

SIMBA: ABidirectional Retrieval Forward Simulation Framework for Modeling FY-4A GIIRS Hyperspectral Infrared Radiances Toward NWP Applications

Hyperspectral infrared observations are an important data source for numerical weather prediction (NWP) because they provide rich information on the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature and humidity. However, most existing deep learning methods mainly focus on one-way retrieval from radiances to atmospheric profiles, while the reverse radiance simulation process and the consistency between atmospheric state space and radiance observation space are insufficiently considered. In this study, we propose SIMBA, a unified bidirectional retrieval-forward simulation framework for FY-4A GIIRS hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling toward NWP applications. The framework jointly performs atmospheric profile retrieval and radiance reconstruction, introduces a cycle-consistency constraint to strengthen the coupling between the two processes, and employs a bidirectional Mamba state-space module to capture long-range dependencies along pressure levels. Using collocated FY-4A GIIRS observations and ERA5 reanalysis data, the proposed method is evaluated for temperature retrieval, specific humidity retrieval, long-wave radiance reconstruction, and medium-wave radiance reconstruction. Experimental results show that SIMBA outperforms several representative deep learning baselines across both retrieval and reconstruction tasks, while ablation experiments confirm the contribution of the bidirectional design and cycle-consistency mechanism. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for joint atmospheric profile retrieval and hyperspectral infrared radiance modeling, and suggest potential for future Jacobian-related analysis and NWP-oriented extensions.
Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link

Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit ββ = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption (ββ = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification (ββ = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools.
May 24, 2026cs.LG

RealBench: Benchmarking Data-Driven Numerical Weather Forecasting Under Operational Conditions and Extreme Event Challenges

Accurate evaluation of weather forecasting models is critical for their reliable deployment in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on reanalysis products such as ERA5, which are generated through delayed data assimilation and do not reflect the constraints of real-time operational forecasting, thereby resulting in a systematic mismatch between benchmark performance and real-world forecasting. In this work, we introduce RealBench, a next-generation benchmark for AI weather forecasting that emphasizes realistic evaluation under operational conditions. RealBench features a strictly out-of-distribution test set spanning 2025 to eliminate data leakage and capture recent atmospheric regimes. It integrates multiple data sources, including low-latency operational analysis and a large-scale global in-situ observation dataset comprising over 10,000 stations, enabling direct evaluation against real atmospheric measurements. Beyond standard global metrics, RealBench provides a comprehensive evaluation framework for high-impact extreme events, including heatwaves, cold surges, and tropical cyclones, using event-specific metrics that better reflect real-world forecasting priorities. The evaluation results reveal substantial discrepancies between reanalysis-based metrics and real-world performance, particularly concerning extreme events. By highlighting the limitations of existing benchmarks, this work establishes a more faithful and operationally relevant evaluation paradigm, providing a rigorous foundation for advancing next-generation AI weather forecasting systems. The benchmark implementation is available at: https://github.com/lixruize-del/NWP-Benchmark.
May 18, 2026cs.CL

Readers make targeted regressions to plausible errors in reanalysis of "noisy-channel garden-path" sentences

A key question in psycholinguistics is how inferences about the meaning of linguistic input unfold incrementally a comprehender's mind. In this work, we study reading dynamics for ``noisy-channel garden-path'' sentences, which temporarily appear well-formed but feature late-appearing violations of expectation that can be resolved not by inferring an alternative syntactic structure, but by inferring the presence of an error. We find evidence for targeted regressions -- eye movements towards regions that are promising loci of possible errors in light of later-arriving information, showing patterns consistent with the posterior inferences of a model of noisy-channel processing with reanalysis. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of noisy-channel language comprehension and information-theoretic explanations of reading dynamics.
May 9, 2026cs.LG

METBRA25Y: Brazil Surface Meteorology Archive with Harmonized Variables and Quality Control

This data paper describes METBRA25Y, a harmonized archive of hourly surface meteorological observations from Brazil derived from public historical records of the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (INMET). The dataset was designed to support reproducible environmental, climatological, hydrological, agricultural, urban-risk, and machine-learning studies that require station-level meteorological time series with standardized variable names and explicit quality-control metadata. The processing workflow ingests annual INMET archives, parses station metadata from raw file headers, normalizes heterogeneous Portuguese column names into a canonical schema, constructs hourly timestamps, consolidates observations by city and station, and exports compressed CSV files together with station manifests, per-station quality flags, daily precipitation aggregates, variable-level failure summaries, and missing-data audits. The quality-control protocol follows a two-stage strategy: first, physically implausible values are converted to missing values and flagged; second, temporal and cross-variable consistency checks generate diagnostic flags without necessarily overwriting the original measurements. The resulting package covers observations between 2000 and 2025, with stationspecific temporal coverage, and includes key meteorological variables such as precipitation, air temperature, dew point, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, wind gust, wind direction, and global solar radiation. Based on the summary files included in the current release snapshot, the archive contains 616 unique station codes across variable summaries, of which 605 have coordinates within a broad Brazil plausibility envelope. This paper documents the dataset provenance, file organization, harmonized schema, quality-control rules, technical validation outputs, limitations, and recommended usage practices.
Apr 23, 2026cs.LG

A Scale-Adaptive Framework for Joint Spatiotemporal Super-Resolution with Diffusion Models

Deep-learning video super-resolution has progressed rapidly, but climate applications typically super-resolve (increase resolution) either space or time, and joint spatiotemporal models are often designed for a single pair of super-resolution (SR) factors (upscaling spatial and temporal ratio between the low-resolution sequence and the high-resolution sequence), limiting transfer across spatial resolutions and temporal cadences (frame rates). We present a scale-adaptive framework that reuses the same architecture across factors by decomposing spatiotemporal SR into a deterministic prediction of the conditional mean, with attention, and a residual conditional diffusion model, with an optional mass-conservation (same precipitation amount in inputs and outputs) transform to preserve aggregated totals. Assuming that larger SR factors primarily increase underdetermination (hence required context and residual uncertainty) rather than changing the conditional-mean structure, scale adaptivity is achieved by retuning three factor-dependent hyperparameters before retraining: the diffusion noise schedule amplitude beta (larger for larger factors to increase diversity), the temporal context length L (set to maintain comparable attention horizons across cadences) and optionally a third, the mass-conservation function f (tapered to limit the amplification of extremes for large factors). Demonstrated on reanalysis precipitation over France (Comephore), the same architecture spans super-resolution factors from 1 to 25 in space and 1 to 6 in time, yielding a reusable architecture and tuning recipe for joint spatiotemporal super-resolution across scales.
Feb 4, 2026physics.ao-ph

Symmetric Composition of Anisotropic Operators for Global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Forecasting

Accurate global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) climate forecasting is critical for disaster preparedness and resource management, yet it remains challenging due to chaotic atmospheric dynamics. Despite advances in geometry-aware representations, existing methods do not specify how the zonal and meridional interactions that govern real atmospheric dynamics should be explicitly coordinated and composed, leaving an important architectural gap for S2S forecasting. In this paper, we propose AnisoCast, which explicitly models anisotropic global atmospheric dynamics for accurate S2S climate forecasting. It couples: (1) an Anisotropic Embedding strategy that tokenizes the global grid into latitudinal rings, preserving the integrity of zonal periodic structures; and (2) stacked Aniso Blocks that arrange latent Zonal and Meridional Operators in a weight-shared palindromic composition inspired by symmetric operator splitting. Extensive experiments on the ERA5 reanalysis dataset demonstrate that AnisoCast establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in both forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency.