Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Marine biogeochemical forecasting is increasingly important for managing marine ecosystems and the carbon cycle, yet global, seasonal forecast products lag far behind physical oceanography, held back by the complexity of the processes involved and by data scarcity. We introduce BG4Sea, which to our knowledge is the first global, data-driven system to produce multivariate seasonal forecasts of the marine biogeochemical state. BG4Sea is a modular architecture with a column autoencoder that compresses the vertical column into a low-dimensional latent space, a latent forecaster propagates this representation forward in time, a surface-forcing conditioner that injects physical boundary information via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), and a horizontal-coupling module that incorporates neighboring-column context through cross-attention. The model is trained and evaluated on the global ocean reanalysis BIORYS4 (NEMO/PISCES), and produces six-month forecasts at 1/4 degree, monthly resolution for dissolved chemistry, biology, and carbon-pool variables, outperforming persistence and climatology across most variables and lead times. We position BG4Sea as an interpretable baseline for future, more expressive approaches, and discuss predictability attribution to each component, alongside the model's structural limitations.

Unsteady aerodynamic phenomena, such as gusts, turbulence, and fluid-structure interactions affect an aircraft during flight. For design, optimisation and certification, it is indispensable to quantify such unsteady aerodynamic effects. Industry-standard computational fluid dynamics methods, such as solving the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations or the linearized frequency domain method, are either computationally expensive or restricted by assumptions like linearity. Once trained, machine learning methods are capable of computing non-linear relationships very fast, making them suitable as surrogate models. By autoregressively applying graph neural networks (GNNs), operating on a discretised spatial domain, spatio-temporal predictions can be made. However, autoregressive GNNs suffer from error accumulation leading to unstable rollouts over time. Here we show that combining GNNs with augmented Neural Ordinary Differential Equations yields temporally stable predictions of the surface forces on a pitching airfoil. We found that our approach, called GNODE, based on Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, provides temporally more stable, spatially smoother, and overall more accurate results than an autoregressive GNN baseline. Tests are conducted on a dataset consisting of a simulations of a pitching airfoil, including transonic shocks, transient behaviour and dynamic non-linearities. Augmenting GNODEs with additional latent dimensions improves the expressivity and accuracy by capturing underlying history effects. The developed method demonstrates an approach that is suitable to model non-linear spatio-temporal systems with exogenous inputs.

Engineering use of AI forecasting models requires not only high nominal accuracy but also predictable behavior under uncertain inputs. In photovoltaic (PV) forecasting, this requirement is especially challenging because numerical weather prediction (NWP) errors are temporally correlated, state dependent, and physically coupled across variables. Existing evaluations, however, often rely on perfect forecast assumptions or simplistic perturbations that do not reflect these characteristics. This study presents a physically constrained robustness evaluation framework based on simulation, using virtual PV power as a controlled response variable to isolate the propagation of input uncertainty from confounders at the plant level. Six representative machine learning and deep sequence models, including PatchTST, GRU, N-HITS, and LightGBM, are evaluated under dynamic NWP perturbations with heteroscedasticity modulated by clear-sky conditions and Erbs reconstruction that preserves radiation consistency. The results show that sequence models provide stronger noise filtering and temporal resilience than a strong tabular baseline under medium to high disturbance regimes. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Integrated Gradients (IG) further support a feature reallocation tendency at the case level, in which predictive reliance shifts from corrupted future forecasts toward more stable historical observations and deterministic physical priors. A Pareto analysis of accuracy under clean conditions, robustness, and computational latency then translates these findings into engineering implications for robustness assessment and model selection under forecast uncertainty.

Real-world traffic data exhibit heterogeneous spatial correlations and nonlinear temporal dynamics, posing substantial challenges for accurate spatio-temporal forecasting. Existing approaches have developed increasingly sophisticated graph, attention, and decomposition architectures, while the influence of the underlying nonlinear function approximator has received comparatively less attention. In this work, we propose STKAN, a spatio-temporal forecasting architecture that introduces Taylor-polynomial Kolmogorov--Arnold Network modules into spatial and temporal token mixing. STKAN first constructs high-level spatial representations through a learnable soft node-group assignment mechanism, applies group-wise spatial mixing, and subsequently models temporal dependencies over the compressed sequence. Spatial and temporal self-attention layers are further employed to capture long-range interactions. Experiments on five traffic forecasting benchmarks show that STKAN achieves competitive performance and performs better than the evaluated MLP-based variant in the tested settings. These results suggest that the design of nonlinear function approximators can serve as a useful complement to architectural design in spatio-temporal forecasting.

Existing traffic forecasting models commonly focus on extracting spatial dependencies, particularly global spatial information, which characterizes the representations obtained through interactions between each individual node and all nodes across the traffic network. However, the underlying mechanism by which such global information is modeled and extracted remains insufficiently investigated. Whether global information must be extracted by high-degree-of-freedom adaptive attention or can be captured by a simple global aggregation operator remains unclear. For this purpose, we design a controlled ablation framework that replaces only the spatial mixing module to test attention-based global interaction. Across six traffic benchmarks, uniform full-range mixing and standard spatial attention each achieve lower MAE on three datasets, with only a 0.14% difference in mean MAE, while the former reduces node-scale spatial mixing complexity from O(N2) to O(N). Mechanism analysis further decomposes spatial attention into a row-uniform global background and a non-uniform residual. The residual shows dataset-dependent marginal value, suggesting that spatial attention should be justified by stable gains beyond a row-uniform global background. The corresponding source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/uuesti/U-Trans

Reliable forecasting of several interrelated environmental variables - such as regional precipitation and temperature, or other correlated geophysical fields - across many locations calls for accurate predictions accompanied by trustworthy statements of their uncertainty. Modern deep-learning models forecast such variables accurately but usually report no uncertainty, and forcing them to output uncertainty through maximum likelihood tends to degrade their accuracy, especially when the variables are strongly correlated. Motivated by this tension, we develop TSCoNet, a two-stage convolutional-recurrent model coupled with a Gaussian copula that jointly forecasts multiple variables over space and time while quantifying predictive uncertainty. The method first learns accurate mean forecasts and then, holding the mean fixed, refines a shared representation to estimate the predictive variance, yielding calibrated prediction intervals after a standard recalibration, so that uncertainty is added without sacrificing point accuracy. We study the approach on simulated non-stationary spatial fields on the sphere and on a real dataset of monthly precipitation and temperature for fifty cities over 2000-2020. The model matches the accuracy of a strong deterministic forecaster while supplying calibrated prediction intervals that the deterministic model cannot, giving a single tool that provides both accurate point forecasts and reliable uncertainty for multivariate spatio-temporal data.

We introduce a new conformal prediction method that constructs calibrated prediction sets over collections of spatial events, such as tropical cyclone genesis and earthquake locations. Forecasting natural hazards has become increasingly important, due to their significant economic impact, and quantifying the uncertainty of predictions is critical for accurate risk assessment. Our approach works by representing spatial point clouds as empirical measures so that we can score them using (sliced) Wasserstein distance, then constraining the resulting distribution-valued prediction set to be supported only near the training data manifold. We derive a coverage lower bound for the intersected sets and show that, in practice, this gap can be made small through a simple data-adaptive selection criterion. Because the resulting set is not analytically tractable, we introduce a modified flow-based sampling procedure, which allows us to represent and apply these prediction sets in practice as ensembles. Numerical experiments on synthetic data, tropical cyclone genesis, and earthquake occurrences show that our method achieves near-nominal coverage, with significantly lower energy distance and manifold distance than highest predictive density region (HDR) baselines along with generative model baselines.

Coordinated beamforming in distributed 5G networks relies on the timely exchange of inter-cell scheduling information, but backhaul latency makes this information stale. Even a single transmission time interval (TTI) of delay can reduce CBF-SLNR performance below the uncoordinated baseline, because the precoder suppresses interference toward users that are no longer active. Coordination on stale information is therefore worse than no coordination at all. To address this, we propose a two-stage predictive framework in which a Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network (StemGNN) predicts future user equipment (UE) scheduling states from delayed historical observations, and the predictions replace stale inputs to the CBF-SLNR precoder. Evaluated on a three-cell massive MIMO downlink with 60 UEs and 64 antennas per base station under Quadriga Urban Micro (UMi) channels and a proportional fair scheduler, StemGNN achieves a mean scheduling prediction accuracy of 87.57%, outperforming LSTM, GRU, Simple RNN, and Markov chain baselines at all evaluated horizons, with gains of up to 7.71% over LSTM at longer horizons where inter-UE structural dependencies dominate over temporal autocorrelation. When integrated into coordinated beamforming, the predictions recover 57-73% of the sum rate loss caused by one TTI of backhaul delay, improving sum rate by 9.58-14.35% over the no-prediction baseline and recovering up to 83% of the Lag-1 fairness loss for cell-edge users, with fairness gains persisting at higher lag values where throughput gains diminish. These results show that treating backhaul latency as a spatio-temporal forecasting problem is an effective approach for robust inter-cell coordination in delay-constrained networks.

Quantum reservoir computing uses a fixed quantum circuit as a feature generator and trains only a simple linear readout on top of it. This makes it cheap to train and free of the optimisation problems that affect many quantum machine-learning models. A natural worry is that the very large feature space the circuit produces might inflate apparent performance without adding anything real. This paper provides two things. First, it gives a complete, reproducible recipe for one such reservoir applied to forecasting chaotic systems, including how data is fed in, how the circuit is built, and how the readout is trained. Second, it gives a way to tell whether the reservoir's high dimension is actually doing useful work. We grow the size of the prediction problem and the size of the quantum reservoir together, so that extra capacity cannot be the explanation for any improvement, and we track a single stability number that measures how well behaved the readout fit is. On two chaotic test systems, a spatiotemporal chain and a shallow-water fluid model, the quantum reservoir keeps a flat, stable error as both sizes grow, while a matched classical reservoir does not. We report where the classical baseline is in fact stronger, so the comparison is honest. The result is a clean specification plus a diagnostic that other groups can apply to any reservoir whose features have a known scale.

Pseudo-nitzschia diatoms pose recurrent risks to coastal ecosystems and shellfish harvesting along the Portuguese Atlantic coast. Here we develop and evaluate a spatio-temporal machine-learning framework to predict harmful algal bloom (HAB) occurrence using exclusively satellite-derived predictors under realistic forecasting constraints. We characterised environmental and biological variability across shellfish production zones (L1-L9) using 5,882 observations, providing system-wide context. Predictive models were developed for zones L1-L2, a hotspot for Pseudo-nitzschia and domoic acid events, using a decade-long dataset (2013-2023; 1,440 observations; more than 1,000 satellite-based predictors including sea surface temperature, an upwelling index, chlorophyll-a, and plankton functional types). Sampling locations were partitioned into ecologically meaningful sub-regions using a river-aware spatial clustering scheme. A stringent spatio-temporal cross-validation strategy that simultaneously withholds entire years and spatial clusters prevents leakage and closely mimics real-world forecasting conditions. HAB occurrence proved moderately predictable across model classes and feature configurations. Ensemble tree-based methods achieved the strongest discrimination: Random Forest reached 0.74 +/- 0.05 with environmental predictors; Extra Trees reached 0.77 +/- 0.06 with biological variables added. Feature-importance analyses revealed that seasonal structure, spatial context, and lagged environmental conditions dominate model decisions, while biological indicators refine bloom likelihood within physically favourable periods. The framework demonstrates operationally relevant skill for satellite-supported HAB early-warning systems along eastern boundary upwelling coasts.

Accurate forecasting of cellular network traffic is essential for network planning, resource allocation, and quality-of-service assurance in modern mobile communication systems. Real-world traffic often exhibits bursty endogenous dynamics and disturbances triggered by external urban events, which makes reliable prediction highly challenging. Most existing spatiotemporal traffic forecasting methods primarily focus on intrinsic traffic patterns or structural relationships within a single modality, and rarely model burst behavior together with exogenous contextual signals. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{MSPF-Net}, a multimodal cellular traffic forecasting framework that integrates external contextual information. Specifically, MSPF-Net consists of a Spatiotemporal-Frequency Traffic Encoder for capturing temporal, spatial, and spectral traffic patterns, a Peak Enhancement Module for extracting burst-aware representations of sudden spikes, a News Context Representation Module for encoding urban news streams into exogenous contextual embeddings, and a Dynamic Fusion Prediction Module for adaptively integrating these heterogeneous signals to generate forecasts. Experiments on the Milano, Trento, and LTE traffic datasets demonstrate that jointly modeling traffic dynamics, burst patterns, and news contextual signals can effectively improve forecasting performance.

This paper presents a physics-guided machine learning (PGML) framework for fuel density prediction, integrating physics constraints and domain knowledge into deep learning models to enhance model accuracy and stability. We explore three deep learning architectures -- ConvLSTM, Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator (AFNONet), and Video Vision Transformer (ViViT) -- to model the spatiotemporal evolution of fuel density. Our approach incorporates differentiable physics-informed terms in the loss function, including a mass-conserving fuel transport term and a rate-of-spread estimation. Experimental results, averaged across multiple independent trials, demonstrate that the proposed PGML framework outperforms purely data-driven baselines without physics constraints in both accuracy and stability. This framework enables computationally efficient, physically plausible fire forecasting to support adaptive prescribed burn management.

Accurate station-level demand forecasting is essential for the efficient operation of bike-sharing systems, yet it remains challenging due to complex spatio-temporal dependencies and the large scale of urban networks. This paper presents STAGformer, a Spatio-Temporal Agent Graph Transformer that achieves efficient global modeling with linear computational complexity. The model introduces a two-step agent attention mechanism, where a small set of learnable spatial and temporal agent tokens first aggregate global information and then broadcast it back to individual stations and time steps, effectively capturing long-range interactions while reducing the quadratic cost of standard self-attention to O(NT). STAGformer integrates four core modules: a spatio-temporal encoder that fuses dynamic node features with external contextual factors (weather, time, points of interest), a graph propagation module for spatial neighbor aggregation, a temporal convolution module for local pattern extraction, and the agent attention module for global dependency modeling. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets -- NYC Citi-Bike and Chicago Divvy-Bike -- demonstrate that STAGformer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple prediction horizons, achieving significant improvements in both RMSE and MAE. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each component, with the agent attention mechanism proving critical for modeling global spatio-temporal dependencies.

ERA5 seasonal climate variables contain predictive information about future glacier retreat beyond what satellite imagery alone provides, yet existing deep learning methods focus on mapping current boundaries rather than forecasting future ones. This paper presents GlacierCastAI, which reframes glacier boundary prediction as a multi-modal spatiotemporal forecasting problem, fusing multi-temporal Landsat imagery with ERA5 reanalysis climate variables and Copernicus DEM terrain features to forecast glacier boundaries across five glaciers spanning four climate regimes. The architecture couples a ResNet50 spatial encoder with a ConvLSTM temporal model and a cross-attention climate fusion module. Because forecasting is inherently more uncertain than mapping current boundaries, the reported IoU values (0.320-0.337) are not directly comparable to state-of-the-art mapping models. Comparisons are against traditional baselines and experimental conditions. Through a pre-registered ablation study, adding ERA5 climate signals improves image-only IoU from 0.326 to 0.337 (+3.4%), suggesting that atmospheric forcing carries predictive information beyond imagery alone. All deep learning models substantially outperform persistence and linear trend baselines (IoU 0.160 and 0.169 respectively), with improvements of 89-99% relative IoU. A lightweight climate-only MLP baseline (661K parameters) achieves an IoU of 0.320 (98% of image-only performance) using 85x fewer parameters, suggesting that ERA5 variables encode substantial predictive signal independently of satellite imagery. SHAP attribution analysis suggests that spring solar radiation (MAM) is the dominant climate driver, consistent with the known role of spring insolation in setting melt season trajectories.

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.

Existing ViT-based weather forecasting models apply uniform computation across all spatial tokens, even though nearby atmospheric grid points often contain similar values and large regions evolve smoothly over time. This makes much of the intermediate per-token computation redundant. Standard token-efficiency methods, such as pruning or merging, reduce cost by removing or fusing tokens. However, weather forecasting is a spatiotemporal dense prediction problem in which a history of atmospheric states must be mapped to future values on the original latitude-longitude grid. Thus, every grid cell must retain a physically meaningful representation, especially under autoregressive rollout. We introduce Sparse-Reslim, a parameter-free plug-in routing module that makes sparse token processing compatible with this fixed-grid requirement. Sparse-Reslim routes only 25% of spatial tokens through the expensive middle transformer blocks and treats those blocks as residual updates: it computes the change produced for the routed tokens and scatters only this delta back to the full sequence. Unselected tokens keep their pre-routing representations exactly, so no grid cell is dropped or replaced by a mask token, and no fusion layer or additional parameters are introduced. Across ERA5 resolutions up to the operational 0.25\textdegree{} standard and two model families, a deterministic Transformer and a diffusion model, Sparse-Reslim improves forecast accuracy on every evaluated variable while substantially reducing cost: training is about 2.5x faster in the main settings and reaches 3.18x speedup at 0.25\textdegree{}, with over 2.2x lower peak memory. A controlled decomposition shows that the accuracy gain comes primarily from sparse routing itself, while random token selection provides an additional regularization benefit without selector overhead.

Spatio-temporal point-process models must often generalise across space when local event histories are sparse. We study whether exogenous spatial context can compensate in such regimes. Using a fixed log-Gaussian Cox process backbone, we compare an event-only model with the same model augmented by AlphaEarth embeddings as linear spatial context. We evaluate spatial transfer on emergency medical services (EMS) forecasting across eight held-out regions, fixed forecast anchors, and a sweep over history length $w$, using only AlphaEarth (AE) embeddings available strictly before each anchor. AE improves out-of-region predictive performance across all history regimes, with the largest gains under scarce histories: approximately $2$--$6\times$ multiplicative improvements at $1-2$ weeks, tapering to roughly $10$--$20\%$ at $w=20$--$104$ weeks. These results show that contextual information can substantially stabilise spatially transferred point-process forecasts when event history is limited.

Static radio maps provide location-dependent propagation priors, but they cannot capture short-term blockage caused by moving objects. Direct sensing-assisted beam prediction is also limited because a beam index discards SINR margins, MCS thresholds, BS alternatives, and communication-equivalent neighboring beams. This paper proposes QuaMoE-DRF, a quality-aware multimodal dynamic radio map forecasting framework for proactive beam and rate adaptation in ISAC networks. Its core representation is a future beam-SINR field. We show that the full multi-BS beam-SINR field is sufficient for finite-codebook threshold-rate BS, beam, MCS, goodput, and outage decisions. For tractability, the implemented model learns a compact reference-BS local field, complemented by BS-level supervision, joint BS--beam supervision, and latent network context; we also clarify that this compact projection alone is not sufficient for BS association. QuaMoE-DRF fuses static geometry, event-like motion observations, structured sensing states, and wireless history through a quality-aware mixture-of-experts module motivated by inverse-variance fusion under heteroscedastic modality errors. It jointly predicts communication-oriented map channels and proactive BS, beam, and MCS decisions. On a dynamic multi-BS and multi-UE urban benchmark, QuaMoE-DRF achieves 402.5 Mbps effective rate, 0.0417 outage probability, and 0.1836 map RMSE, improving the effective rate by 5.67% and reducing outage by 8.35% over the strongest completed effective-rate baseline. The current validation uses labels from a compact blockage/path-loss simulator, with ray tracing used only for calibration and sanity checking.

Predicting complex spatiotemporal dynamics in physical processes often demands computationally expensive numerical methods or data-driven neural networks that suffer from high training costs, error accumulation, and limited generalizability to unseen parameters. An effective approach to address these challenges is leveraging physics priors in training neural networks, known as physics-informed deep learning (PiDL). In this work, we introduce the Multi-Resolution Finite-Volume-inspired network, MuRFiV, designed to capitalize on the conservative property of finite volume on the global scale and the expressive power of deep learning on the local scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MuRFiV on several spatio-temporal systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), including Burgers' equation, shallow water equations, and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. By embedding PDE information into the deep learning architecture, MuRFiV achieves strong long-term prediction accuracy and remains stable over very long autoregressive rollouts, significantly outperforming data-driven neural network baselines. This result highlights the promise of combining multiresolution learning with finite-volume-inspired inductive bias for accurate and robust long-term prediction of complex dynamics.

Accurate energy demand forecasting is essential for the reliable operation and planning of modern sustainable energy systems. Spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have recently achieved strong performance in point forecasting by jointly modeling temporal dynamics and relational dependencies across interconnected energy nodes. However, in real-world energy systems, accurate point forecasts alone are insufficient, as operators also require reliable uncertainty estimates to support risk-aware decision-making, grid stability, and operational planning under uncertainty. Conformal prediction provides a principled and model-agnostic framework for uncertainty quantification under exchangeability assumptions, making it particularly attractive for safety-critical energy applications. However, existing conformal prediction approaches often fail to fully capture the complex spatial-temporal structure of energy systems. To address these limitations, we propose STOIC (Spatial-Temporal uncertainty quantificatiOn via In-Context learning), a conformal-inspired post-hoc residual calibration framework that integrates graph-based forecasting with the in-context learning capabilities of tabular foundation models. STOIC first generates point forecasts using an STGNN and subsequently reformulates spatial-temporal residuals into a tabular representation suitable for in-context learning. Leveraging a tabular foundation model, STOIC estimates feature-conditional residual quantiles without task-specific retraining of the calibration model, effectively capturing both sequential and relational dependencies. STOIC should be viewed as a conformal-inspired residual calibration method and does not by itself provide a finite-sample distribution-free coverage guarantee under arbitrary temporal dependence...

Forecasting visual fields (VFs) is critical for personalized monitoring and treatment planning in glaucoma. This is inherently uncertain due to heterogeneous disease progression and measurement variability, yet most existing methods produce single deterministic predictions that fail to represent this uncertainty. We formulate VF forecasting as a probabilistic prediction problem and the use of conditioned denoising diffusion models to generate distributions of plausible future VFs from longitudinal observations with irregular follow-up intervals. Experiments on two independent VF cohorts show that diffusion-based predictions produce well-calibrated distributions for clinically relevant VF measures. When reduced to a standard point-estimate, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy compared to clinical baselines and prior learning-based methods. Our results highlight the advantages of distributional modeling for VF forecasting and support a shift from point-estimate prediction toward uncertainty-aware, clinically interpretable risk assessment in glaucoma.

Earth system infrastructures relying on satellite-based technologies, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) communications, are affected by ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC) gradients. Modeling these gradients under physical constraints remains challenging due to their dynamic and transient nature. While existing machine learning (ML) models can predict hourly TEC variations, it remains unclear whether their temporal resolution is sufficient to preserve small-scale TEC irregularities within predicted signals. To address this gap, we introduce an interpretable ML-based model, t-STEP, designed to predict TEC at a 30-second resolution and estimate irregularity signatures from the modeled signals. This high cadence enables the derivation of Rate of TEC changes (ROT) and the ROT Index (ROTI) as diagnostic indicators of ionospheric variability. The model is developed using GPS observations from solar cycle 24 at a station located at 5.49°S, 47.49°W. A multi-metric evaluation framework, including dynamic time warping, is used for robustness assessment, while SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) provides insight into feature contributions. The 30-second TEC predictions achieve 91% accuracy with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.38 TECU during high solar activity (2015). Compared with the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI-2020), the hourly model improves accuracy by 35%, reduces absolute errors by 57%, and increases prediction skill by 54%. More importantly, the 30-second model captures TEC irregularity dynamics and morphologies during geomagnetic storms of different intensities, outperforming an attention-based Long Short-Term Memory model under the same experimental conditions. This study demonstrates the potential of a single TEC prediction framework for scalable irregularity monitoring without requiring separate models for individual transient events.

Traffic matrices (TMs) capture network-wide origin-destination demand and are central to traffic engineering, yet accurate whole-matrix forecasting remains challenging when prediction must be performed under the memory, update, and training-budget constraints of online network control. This paper investigates whether compact quantum-inspired recurrent models can provide effective TM forecasts without relying on dedicated graph, transformer, or diffusion modules. We adapt gated quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold network fast-weight programmers (QKAN-FWPs) to direct multi-step Abilene TM forecasting, where each model predicts the next 20 five-minute frames of a 144-channel origin-destination (OD) matrix from a two-hour history. We benchmark three QKAN placement variants against a matched-size long short-term memory (LSTM) network, a larger LSTM, and a classical gated fast-weight programmer under a shared fixed-budget training protocol. Among the evaluated recurrent models, G-QKANFWP achieves the best pooled root-mean-square error (RMSE), while using only 22.4% of the larger LSTM. It also outperforms both the matched-size LSTM and the classical G-FWP baseline, indicating that the gain is not due to gated fast-weight framework alone. Convergence and channel-wise analyses further show that the quantum-inspired variants obtain lower validation-loss area under the learning curve (AULC) than matched-size recurrent baselines, while G-QKANFWP and GQKAN-FWP achieve substantially more OD-channel wins. These results identify a classical slow programmer with a quantum-inspired fast programmer as a promising accuracy-efficiency design for resource-conscious network traffic-matrix forecasting.

Earth Observation (EO) forecasting aims to predict future Earth surface dynamics from satellite observations under changing meteorological conditions. In this paper, we view this task as a partially observed, weather-driven world modeling problem, in which weather acts as a conditioning signal, while forecasting remains uncertain due to sparse observations and unobserved land-surface states. However, existing methods do not fully capture this setting: deterministic models collapse uncertainty into a single future prediction, while diffusion-based methods typically treat weather variables as undifferentiated conditioning signals, and existing benchmarks focus mainly on reconstruction accuracy rather than whether forecasts respond correctly to changed weather forcing.We introduce EO-WM, a video diffusion transformer for multispectral EO forecasting. EO-WM incorporates a physically informed conditioning framework that represents meteorological forcing through a climatological baseline, weather anomalies, and cumulative physical stress signals. Specifically, it separates baseline and anomaly through distinct conditioning pathways, and accumulates anomalous forcing over time to capture sustained heat and drought stress. To evaluate weather-response behavior beyond standard metrics, we introduce two diagnostic benchmarks: an Extreme Summer Benchmark for severity-aware prediction of vegetation degradation under extreme weather, and a Seasonal Matched-Pair Benchmark for testing response fidelity under changed weather forcing. Experiments show that EO-WM reduces the error in predicted Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) decline amplitude by a relative 5.63% and improves directional hit rate by a relative 7.80%, while remaining competitive on standard pixel-level metrics. The benchmarks and model will be made open-source at https://github.com/Luo-Z13/EO-WM.

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.

Spatiotemporal systems comprise a collection of spatially distributed yet interdependent entities each generating unique dynamic signals. Highly sophisticated methods have been proposed in recent years delivering state-of-the-art (SOTA) forecasts but few have focused on interpretability. To address this, we propose the Future Decomposition Network (FDN), a novel forecast model capable of (a) providing interpretable predictions through classification (b) revealing latent activity patterns in the target time-series and (c) delivering forecasts competitive with SOTA methods at a fraction of their memory and runtime cost. We conduct comprehensive analyses on FDN for multiple datasets from hydrologic, traffic, and energy systems, demonstrating its improved accuracy and interpretability.

Accurate particulate matter (PM) prediction is crucial for mitigating air pollution. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively model spatiotemporal dependencies, but predefined graphs limit adaptability, and some datasets complicate learning. This study introduces a graph construction method based on a confusion matrix from a supervised learning process to dynamically capture inter-class relationships. Additionally, a hybrid loss function that combines energy distance and Huber loss is applied to address the vanishing gradient problem and improve learning stability. The approach is evaluated using air pollution data from the University of Utah AirU Pollution Monitoring Network in Salt Lake City, UT, with five GNN models: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Simple Graph Convolutional Networks (SGConv), Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs), Graph Attention Networks (GATs), and GraphSage. The experimental results of single- and multistep predictions confirm that GraphSage achieves the highest accuracy in predicting the concentrations of PM${1}$, PM${10}$, and PM$_{2.5}$ over different time horizons. Furthermore, {\color{black} GNNExplainer (Graph Neural Network Explainer) and PGExplainer (Probabilistic Graph Explainer)} are applied to interpret feature importance and graph structure, ensuring model transparency. Results show improved prediction accuracy, with GNN models outperforming traditional machine learning \textcolor{black}{and deep learning models (i.e., Prophet, Long short-term memory, Gated recurrent units} in air pollution forecasting.

Accurate short-term PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting is important for public health protection, air-quality early warning, and urban environmental management. However, PM$_{2.5}$ variation is driven by multiple coupled factors, including stable periodic changes induced by human activities and meteorological regularity, station-specific short-term concentration evolution, and meteorology-driven pollutant dispersion among monitoring stations. Existing spatio-temporal forecasting methods may capture station relationships to some extent, but distance-only, correlation-based, or purely adaptive graphs are often insufficient to comprehensively represent these heterogeneous factors, especially wind-direction-dependent pollutant transport. To address this problem, we propose a Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN model for PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting, named \textbf{MVG-KAN}, which models station-level PM$_{2.5}$ evolution from three complementary views: local periodic regularity, station-wise residual temporal dynamics, and meteorological-environment-guided spatial dispersion. Specifically, the periodic-residual forecasting backbone first separates stable daily and weekly patterns from non-periodic residual variations. A Geo-Wind Graph is constructed by combining geographic distance decay with wind-direction- and wind-speed-aware transport, providing a lightweight physically motivated directed spatial prior for residual propagation among stations. In addition, a temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold network (TKAN) residual head is then introduced to learn station-wise nonlinear autoregressive correction from de-periodized PM$_{2.5}$ residuals and historical multi-pollutant sequences, thereby enhancing the modeling of local residual inertia and pollutant co-variation.

Quantum machine learning methods are increasingly explored for modeling complex environmental systems, including groundwater heat plume dynamics. In this work, we explore a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) as a surrogate model for predicting temperature variations in groundwater induced by geothermal heat pumps in the city of Munich. To comply with the scalability constraints of current quantum hardware, the original high-dimensional simulation output is reduced to a compact set of representative parameters that serve as training targets for the surrogate. The proposed QCNN architecture consists of a quantum convolutional layer, a quantum pooling layer, and a fully connected quantum readout stage. Convolution and pooling operations are realized via parameterized quantum circuits based on rotational gates and measurement-driven decoding, while a Hamiltonian-inspired feature-encoding scheme is used to prepare informative input states on the quantum device. We evaluate the QCNN across multiple execution backends, including an ideal statevector simulator, a noisy simulator, IBM's 127-qubit Kyiv quantum processor, and the same hardware augmented with advanced error-mitigation techniques. Realistic noise models are employed to approximate device behavior and to assess the impact of mitigation strategies. Model performance is benchmarked using mean squared error (MSE) on both training and testing sets. The results show that, although classical neural networks still achieve the highest predictive accuracy, the QCNN attains competitive and consistent performance on simulators and exhibits noticeable improvement under error-mitigated hardware conditions. These findings indicate that quantum-enhanced surrogate modeling is a promising direction for future groundwater temperature prediction as quantum hardware and error-mitigation techniques continue to mature.

Biological systems maintain function in fluctuating environments by transforming past stimulation into internal dynamical states that support future-oriented responses. Reservoir computing provides a computational analogue, but standard formulations often treat the recurrent substrate as a fixed random network and train only the readout. Here we ask how the substrate itself changes when reservoir architecture is placed under evolutionary selection for prediction. Using the Kuramoto--Sivashinsky equation as a testbed for spatiotemporal chaos, we evolved reservoirs over five construction hyperparameters: size, connectivity degree, spectral radius, input scaling, and readout regularization. Evolution reduced prediction error at the population level, extended the low-error forecast horizon, and organized the design space along a diminishing-return size--efficiency frontier. Structural analyses showed that evolved reservoirs remained within a conserved stochastic-block-model-like spectral envelope while refining low-eigenvalue modes, locking modularity to an intermediate band, and pruning connection cost within that band. Pareto analysis showed that elite reservoirs occupied a horizontal floor in the cost--modularity plane, indicating that accuracy and efficiency were achieved jointly rather than through a simple trade-off. These findings show that evolutionary optimization does not merely improve prediction, but exposes interpretable structural constraints on the recurrent substrate: it stabilizes a task-suitable dynamical class and refines the architectural degrees of freedom most relevant for prediction. Evolutionary reservoir computing therefore provides a bio-inspired framework for studying how predictive demands shape adaptive dynamical networks.