The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in collaboration with IBM and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has announced the development of a new foundation model for climate- and weather-focused AI capabilities. 

The model offers a flexible, scalable way to address a variety of challenges related to short-term weather as well as long-term climate projection. It is part of the proprietary IBM-NASA Prithvi family of AI foundation models, a series specifically designed for weather applications, with the name derived from the Sanskrit word for “Earth.”

It was pre-trained using 40 years of Earth observation data from NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2). With its distinctive architecture, the foundation model can be fine-tuned for global, regional, and local scales, making it highly adaptable for various weather studies.

“Advancing NASA’s Earth science for the benefit of humanity means delivering actionable science in ways that are useful to people, organizations, and communities. The rapid changes we’re witnessing on our home planet demand this strategy to meet the urgency of the moment. The NASA foundation model will help us produce a tool that people can use: weather, seasonal, and climate projections to help inform decisions on how to prepare, respond, and mitigate,”  Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said.

The foundation model is available for download on Hugging Face, along with two fine-tuned versions tailored for specific applications: one for Climate and Weather Data Downscaling, which produces high-resolution forecasts from low-resolution inputs at up to 12x resolution, and another for Gravity Wave Parameterization, aimed at improving climate model accuracy through a better understanding of gravity waves.