Foundation models have enormous potential in advancing Earth and climate sciences, however, current approaches may not be optimal as they focus on a few basic features of a desirable Earth and climate foundation model. Crafting the ideal Earth foundation model, we define eleven features which would allow such a foundation model to be beneficial for any geoscientific downstream application in an environmental- and human-centric manner.We further shed light on the way forward to achieve the ideal model and to evaluate Earth foundation models. What comes after foundation models? Energy efficient adaptation, adversarial defenses, and interpretability are among the emerging directions.
@article{arxiv.2405.04285,
title = {On the Foundations of Earth and Climate Foundation Models},
author = {Xiao Xiang Zhu and Zhitong Xiong and Yi Wang and Adam J. Stewart and Konrad Heidler and Yuanyuan Wang and Zhenghang Yuan and Thomas Dujardin and Qingsong Xu and Yilei Shi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.04285},
year = {2024}
}