Deep learning has advanced weather forecasting, but accurate predictions first require identifying the current state of the atmosphere from observational data. In this work, we introduce Appa, a score-based data assimilation model generating global atmospheric trajectories at 0.25\si{\degree} resolution and 1-hour intervals. Powered by a 565M-parameter latent diffusion model trained on ERA5, Appa can be conditioned on arbitrary observations to infer plausible trajectories, without retraining. Our probabilistic framework handles reanalysis, filtering, and forecasting, within a single model, producing physically consistent reconstructions from various inputs. Results establish latent score-based data assimilation as a promising foundation for future global atmospheric modeling systems.
@article{arxiv.2504.18720,
title = {Appa: Bending Weather Dynamics with Latent Diffusion Models for Global Data Assimilation},
author = {Gérôme Andry and Sacha Lewin and François Rozet and Omer Rochman and Victor Mangeleer and Matthias Pirlet and Elise Faulx and Marilaure Grégoire and Gilles Louppe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18720},
year = {2025}
}