English

Advanced Long-term Earth System Forecasting

Machine Learning 2026-01-12 v3

Abstract

Reliable long-term forecasting of Earth system dynamics is fundamentally limited by instabilities in current artificial intelligence (AI) models during extended autoregressive simulations. These failures often originate from inherent spectral bias, leading to inadequate representation of critical high-frequency, small-scale processes and subsequent uncontrolled error amplification. Inspired by the nested grids in numerical models used to resolve small scales, we present TritonCast. At the core of its design is a dedicated latent dynamical core, which ensures the long-term stability of the macro-evolution at a coarse scale. An outer structure then fuses this stable trend with fine-grained local details. This design effectively mitigates the spectral bias caused by cross-scale interactions. In atmospheric science, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the WeatherBench 2 benchmark while demonstrating exceptional long-term stability: executing year-long autoregressive global forecasts and completing multi-year climate simulations that span the entire available 25002500-day test period without drift. In oceanography, it extends skillful eddy forecast to 120120 days and exhibits unprecedented zero-shot cross-resolution generalization. Ablation studies reveal that this performance stems from the synergistic interplay of the architecture's core components. TritonCast thus offers a promising pathway towards a new generation of trustworthy, AI-driven simulations. This significant advance has the potential to accelerate discovery in climate and Earth system science, enabling more reliable long-term forecasting and deeper insights into complex geophysical dynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.19432,
  title  = {Advanced Long-term Earth System Forecasting},
  author = {Hao Wu and Yuan Gao and Ruijian Gou and Xian Wu and Chuhan Wu and Huahui Yi and Johannes Brandstetter and Fan Xu and Kun Wang and Penghao Zhao and Hao Jia and Qi Song and Xinliang Liu and Juncai He and Shuhao Cao and Huanshuo Dong and Yanfei Xiang and Fan Zhang and Haixin Wang and Xingjian Shi and Qiufeng Wang and Shuaipeng Li and Ruobing Xie and Feng Tao and Yuxu Lu and Yu Guo and Yuntian Chen and Yuxuan Liang and Qingsong Wen and Wanli Ouyang and Deliang Chen and Niklas Boers and Xiaomeng Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.19432},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:38:06.433Z