Other¶
-
Tracing the space-time causal origins of Earth system extremes¶
Identifying the causes of Earth's extremes is challenging because counterfactual experiments are not possible in the observed world, while numerical experiments are computationally expensive and...Identifying the causes of Earth's extremes is challenging because counterfactual experiments are not possible in the observed world, while numerical experiments are computationally expensive and subject to biases. Data-driven causal discovery offers a complementary path, but existing approaches can fail in undersampled, high-dimensional regimes, and may not recover multi-timestep, multivariate pathways leading to particular events. We introduce Tracer of Causal Evolutions in Space and Time (TraCE-ST), a probabilistic Lagrangian approach that produces event-conditioned causal trajectories in multivariate gridded data. In synthetic experiments and real-world extreme events, TraCE-ST recovers known causal drivers and estimates their relative contributions, while also highlighting less-studied drivers, including orography-driven vorticity for Tropical Storm Debby (2006) and anomalous ocean-surface fluxes for the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave. Here, we propose causal tracking as an efficient data-driven framework for synthesizing causal evidence and generating testable hypotheses, complementing association analyses and numerical modeling while accelerating the study of high-impact events. more
-
Spatial Support Matters: Geometry-Aware Graph Fusion for Rainfall Field Reconstruction¶
Fine-scale rainfall reconstruction is critical for urban flood modeling, but real rainfall sensing systems observe the field through incompatible spatial supports: gauges measure points, microwave...Fine-scale rainfall reconstruction is critical for urban flood modeling, but real rainfall sensing systems observe the field through incompatible spatial supports: gauges measure points, microwave links measure paths, and radar/satellite products measure gridded areas. These differences in measurement support impose geometrically distinct constraints on the rainfall field, yet existing heterogeneous graph approaches reconcile such sources in feature space, giving each its own embedding while discarding the geometry of its support. We propose a geometry-aware multi-support heterogeneous graph neural network that represents each observation according to its support type (0D point, 1D line, or 2D grid) as a distinct node layer, and fuses them through cross-support message passing into a point-support prediction layer from which the field is reconstructed. An inductive masked-node formulation decouples prediction resolution from sensing resolution, allowing the same trained model to reconstruct the field at user-defined target locations or display grids. On Singapore data, the proposed method reduces RMSE by 23.2% over the classical interpolation baseline, inverse-distance weighting, and consistently outperforms other neural architectures such as convolutional fusion and support-agnostic heterogeneous graph baselines. A generalization study using data from Sydney, Australia lets us characterize when multi-support fusion helps: the available skill appears to depend on gauge spacing relative to the spatial correlation length of the field, so fusion delivers the largest gains where the field is under-sampled relative to its correlation length and little when it is already resolved. Code and models will be open-sourced upon paper acceptance. more
-
Wind-Aware Reinforcement Learning Control of a Small Quadrotor Using Learned Onboard Wind Estimation in Simulated Atmospheric Turbulence¶
Small multirotor aircraft are increasingly tasked with operations in the atmospheric boundary layer, where turbulent winds comparable to the vehicle's airspeed degrade trajectory tracking and can...Small multirotor aircraft are increasingly tasked with operations in the atmospheric boundary layer, where turbulent winds comparable to the vehicle's airspeed degrade trajectory tracking and can defeat conventional feedback control. This work illustrates a two-stage learning pipeline that first estimates the local wind from onboard kinematics and dynamics and then exploits that estimate inside a reinforcement learning (RL) flight controller. The wind estimator, an attention-augmented gated recurrent network trained on thousands of simulated flights through von Karman turbulence with power-law shear and veer, recovers the horizontal wind vector with a per-flight root-mean-square error of 0.40 m/s and a direction error of 3.2 degrees on unseen wind regimes, an accuracy near the floor imposed by unresolved turbulence, and generalizes to vertical ascent profiles with a skill score of 0.861 over a constant-wind reference. A proximal policy optimization controller receiving the frozen estimator's output reduces horizontal trajectory tracking error by 48% relative to a wind-blind proportional-derivative baseline across mean winds of 4 m/s to 12 m/s, winning on 100% of evaluation episodes. A three-way ablation decomposes this improvement into a kinematic component, available without wind information, and a wind-perception component; the perception share rises with wind speed, from small in light winds toward roughly half the total benefit in strong winds, consistent with the quadratic scaling of aerodynamic drag. The controller degrades gracefully on out-of-distribution winds of 13 m/s to 15 m/s, where the baseline fails catastrophically. more
-
Conditional Tropical Cyclogenesis Rates via Rare-Event Sampling in a Neural Weather Emulator¶
We couple Forward Flux Sampling (FFS), a non-equilibrium rare-event technique from statistical mechanics, to a neural weather emulator (SDL-WXFormer, 1° grid spacing) to estimate conditional tropical...We couple Forward Flux Sampling (FFS), a non-equilibrium rare-event technique from statistical mechanics, to a neural weather emulator (SDL-WXFormer, 1° grid spacing) to estimate conditional tropical cyclogenesis rates, or how often a tropical cyclone achieves a hurricane-level central pressure, without modifying model dynamics. Tropical cyclogenesis rates vary by orders of magnitude across regimes, yet direct ensemble sampling cannot resolve this variability at operationally feasible ensemble sizes. FFS decomposes the rare disturbance to mature cyclone intensification path into a flux through an initial interface pressure and a product of conditional crossing probabilities across four intermediate interface pressures. We use the 1° emulator because FFS requires O(10^4) model trajectories per initial condition, and because the model's calibrated stochastic layers provide the necessary exploratory spread. Applied to 98 Atlantic basin initial conditions spanning 21 August - 8 October 2022, FFS resolves genesis rates spanning nearly three orders of magnitude, capturing a seasonal cycle qualitatively consistent with observations. A self-consistency check comparing FFS rates to independent direct-sampling rates yields a mean ratio of 1.03 +/- 0.15 across all initial conditions. Computational enhancement factors range from 3X (most active environment) to 140X (most suppressed), with a geometric mean of 14X. Three case studies illustrate the physical diagnostics the method provides: the rate-limiting step is initial tropical organization for the Earl environment, uniformly high crossing probabilities for the Fiona precursor environment, and a compound barrier at the final intensification stages for the Ian environment. More efficient emulators would enable application of FFS to finer resolutions. more
-
An Integrated Two-Stage Deep-Learning Tool for Rapid Post-Hurricane Damage Identification and Repair Scheduling¶
Post-hurricane damage assessment and repair scheduling can require computationally intensive simulation and optimization. This paper presents an integrated two-stage deep-learning tool for rapid...Post-hurricane damage assessment and repair scheduling can require computationally intensive simulation and optimization. This paper presents an integrated two-stage deep-learning tool for rapid damaged-line identification and repair-schedule computation. An available offline synthetic dataset for the IEEE 9500-node test feeder contains 1,700 hurricane scenarios with exposure features, grid metadata, fragility parameters, OpenDSS outputs, damaged-line labels, and Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search reference schedules. Stage 1 benchmarks MLP, ResMLP, and GraphSAGE, while Stage 2 compares MLP, DeepSets, and Set Transformer. The selected ResMLP-Set Transformer pipeline propagates Stage 1 errors into Stage 2 and achieves a damaged-job F1-score of 0.920, pairwise order agreement of 0.854, and start- and end-time mean absolute errors of 4.349 min and 4.486 min, respectively. The tool provides rapid initial repair-log decision support for new hurricane cases. more
-
Does Aurora Encode Atmospheric Structure? Latent Regime Analysis and Attribution¶
ML foundation models are able to emulate atmospheric dynamics accurately and efficiently but operate as opaque “black boxes”. We investigate the internal representations of the Aurora model using...ML foundation models are able to emulate atmospheric dynamics accurately and efficiently but operate as opaque “black boxes”. We investigate the internal representations of the Aurora model using spatially pooled PCA and layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP). We find evidence that Aurora's latent space is primarily organized by seasonal cycles, whereas extreme storm events do not form a linearly separable cluster. LRP indicates that the model attends to features consistent with the 3D vertical structure of the Great Storm of 1987. Perturbation tests show masking relevant regions degrades forecasts \(3.31\times\) more than random masking. These findings suggest that Aurora learns meteorological coherence and vertical structure without explicit instruction. more
-
Short-Term Electricity Demand Forecasting for New England: A Comprehensive Machine Learning Benchmark with Weather, Calendar, and COVID-19 Indicators¶
Accurate short-term electricity demand forecasting is critical for reliable power system operation, energy market planning, and infrastructure optimization. This paper benchmarks ten machine learning...Accurate short-term electricity demand forecasting is critical for reliable power system operation, energy market planning, and infrastructure optimization. This paper benchmarks ten machine learning models for daily electricity demand forecasting across the New England ISO (February 2020 - March 2023). The models span four families: tabular gradient-boosted trees (Random Forest, LightGBM, CatBoost, XGBoost), standalone neural architectures (LSTM, Transformer encoder), and hybrid Transformer+tree variants (Hybrid XGBoost, Hybrid LightGBM, Hybrid CatBoost, Hybrid RF). All models use meteorological data from six cities, calendar and holiday effects, autoregressive demand lags, and COVID-19 epidemiological variables. Hyperparameter optimization uses Optuna (300 trials, multivariate TPE, seed=42) under a leakage-free 70/15/15 chronological split. CatBoost achieves the best test performance: RMSE 8316 MWh, MAPE 1.87%, R-squared 0.917, followed by XGBoost (9066 MWh, R-squared 0.901), Hybrid CatBoost (9068 MWh, R-squared 0.901), and Hybrid XGBoost (9208 MWh, R-squared 0.898). Standalone neural architectures perform substantially worse (Transformer: 21294 MWh; LSTM: 22808 MWh), confirming the Transformer's role as a feature extractor rather than an end-to-end forecaster. An ablation on CatBoost shows that demand lags are the dominant predictor: removal degrades RMSE from 8316 to 11310 MWh (+36%), while weather and calendar features alone achieve an R-squared of 0.864. Removing COVID-19 features improves test RMSE by 1.7% while reducing training RMSE by 17.3%, a signature of temporal validity decay. SHAP analysis confirms this: 3 of 8 COVID features rank higher on the post-acute test set than during pandemic-active training, indicating the model over-applies stale pandemic patterns after behavioral adaptation was complete by August 2022. more
-
KFTD: Koopman-Fourier Time-Differentiable Network for Continuous Ocean Spatiotemporal Forecasting¶
Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical...Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical systems and ensuring computational efficiency. We present Koopman Fourier Time-Differentiable (KFTD) Network, a time continuous twostage paradigm that decouples interpolation from prediction to achieve efficient and scalable spatiotemporal modeling. We map complex nonlinear dynamics into the Koopman linear space and exploit Fourier analysis to enable continuous time interpolation at arbitrary sub-steps. A lightweight residual network consumes the high fidelity intermediate states to yield the final forecast. Unlike diffusion models, KFTD eliminates multi step noise sampling and directly evolves the system in continuous time, yielding a 4 computational speedup. We further introduce a DPP Loss that supports arbitrary PDE constraints in an endtoend manner, breaking the physical consistency bottleneck of pure data-driven approaches. Empirical results on four ocean datasets confirm that our continuous time framework reduces MSE by an average of 5.6% (up to 12.7% for SST) and improves efficiency over MCVD by 76.25%. more
-
Can Machine Learning Forecast Rice Yields in Data-Constrained Settings? Satellite Climate Data, National Crop Statistics, and Lessons from Sierra Leone¶
Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields. We ask whether rice yield can be...Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields. We ask whether rice yield can be forecast from data Sierra Leone currently has. Using 25 years of FAOSTAT production data (2000-2024) for nine major crops, we train XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest under a strict anti-leakage protocol with expanding-window walk-forward evaluation across seven held-out years, benchmarked against naive persistence. No model trained on crop statistics alone outperforms persistence. Augmenting with free satellite climate data (CHIRPS rainfall, NASA POWER temperature) reverses this result: a climate-only XGBoost reduces forecast error by one third (RMSE 284 vs 428 kg/ha), a gain that holds for a linear model and is robust to excluding the anomalous 2018 season. Early-season (May-June) rainfall is the dominant predictor, implying seasonal yield risk is observable months before harvest. No model anticipated the 2018 collapse, whose origins were institutional rather than climatic. We translate the findings into policy recommendations for Sierra Leone's Feed Salone Strategy, with a fully open-source pipeline. more
-
AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link¶
Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public...Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit \(β\) = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption (\(β\) = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification (\(β\) = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools. more
-
Stochastic weather generators for high-frequency wind vector time series¶
Surface winds can vary substantially from one minute to the next, so there is scope for studying its variation on this fine time scale. Restricting to the month of June to minimize seasonality, this...Surface winds can vary substantially from one minute to the next, so there is scope for studying its variation on this fine time scale. Restricting to the month of June to minimize seasonality, this work develops a range of machine learning models for generating realistic time series of surface wind vectors at a site in Lamont, Oklahoma based on more than 30 years of high quality measurements at the minute time scale. Such a generator could be used as an input into models from a range of disciplines, notably for wind energy, but also wildfire spread and aviation, among others. The data show complex diurnal structures in both wind speed and direction that would be challenging to capture with standard time series models, so we consider a number of machine learning approaches to producing a stochastic wind generator based on time vector-quantized variational autoencoders. We consider generating a day's worth of data at a time and generating a day of wind vectors conditional on the previous day's winds. We also study methods for incorporating a discrete weather state variable in the generator. We evaluate the generators using a wide range of formal and informal methods. The best of these generators can capture many but not all of the complex features present in the observational data. In particular, the best of our approaches accurately mimic diurnal changes in wind volatility but struggle to match the observed distribution of extreme wind speeds. more
-
Learning effective Sargassum transport dynamics from limited drifter observations¶
Floating-material transport is influenced by unresolved processes that are often absent from available circulation products. We develop a data-driven transport-learning framework for learning...Floating-material transport is influenced by unresolved processes that are often absent from available circulation products. We develop a data-driven transport-learning framework for learning effective transport corrections from limited Lagrangian observations using physically motivated ocean--atmosphere diagnostics and finite-memory representations motivated in part by inertial-particle memory effects. The diagnostic representation is analyzed through predictive and sparse symbolic-discovery approaches under leave-one-trajectory-out validation. Applications to Sargassum-following drifters in the Puerto Rico region and the Gulf Stream show that the diagnostics contain transport-relevant information beyond the baseline circulation products. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) ensembles provide flexible predictive trajectory corrections, while Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) tests whether instantaneous or delayed sparse symbolic transport structure can be extracted from the diagnostics. The results differ across flow regimes: (i) in Puerto Rico, delayed sparse symbolic corrections provide modest but systematic improvement; (ii) in the Gulf Stream application, dynamically useful sparse symbolic corrections remain primarily instantaneous even though delayed predictive information persists. These results support finite-memory transport effects in coarse-grained floating-material transport while also illustrating the difficulty of obtaining stable delayed sparse symbolic closures. more
-
LLM Agent Based Renewable Energy Forecasting Using Edge and IoT Data A Review of Solar Wind Weather and Grid Aware Decision Support¶
Reliable forecasting of renewable energy generation is a foundational requirement for grid stability energy trading battery scheduling and carbon aware operational planning Solar and wind resources...Reliable forecasting of renewable energy generation is a foundational requirement for grid stability energy trading battery scheduling and carbon aware operational planning Solar and wind resources are inherently intermittent their output fluctuates with cloud cover wind speed atmospheric turbulence seasonal patterns and local terrain The proliferation of IoT and edge devices spanning smart meters inverters anemometers pyranometers weather stations and grid interface sensors has created an unprecedented volume of real time operational data that conventional forecasting pipelines are ill equipped to exploit fully This review investigates how large language model LLM agents can enhance renewable energy forecasting by integrating heterogeneous sensor streams weather API data historical generation records grid constraints and contextual reasoning into unified decision support workflows We survey classical forecasting methods statistical time series models deep learning architectures physics hybrid approaches and emerging LLM agent frameworks for explanation uncertainty communication and operator guidance A six layer taxonomy is proposed covering data acquisition preprocessing feature engineering model inference uncertainty estimation and natural language reporting The review identifies twelve open challenges spanning real time deployment model drift under distribution shift uncertainty quantification hallucination control in LLM agents interoperability of edge hardware and integration with energy management systems The paper concludes by recommending a research agenda centred on open benchmarks physics informed LLM grounding and federated forecasting architectures more
-
JAX-SCM v1.0: a modern atmospheric single-column model for boundary layer research¶
We present JAX-SCM v1.0, an open-source atmospheric single-column model for boundary layer research, implemented in Python using the JAX computing library. The model solves for horizontal wind,...We present JAX-SCM v1.0, an open-source atmospheric single-column model for boundary layer research, implemented in Python using the JAX computing library. The model solves for horizontal wind, potential temperature, and specific humidity, combined with prognostic turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent statistics parameterized by the Mellor-Yamada-Nakanishi-Niino level-2.5 (MYNN-2.5) turbulence closure. We verify the implementation against three well-established benchmark cases covering neutral (turbulent Ekman layer), stable (GABLS1), and convective (Wangara Day 33) conditions. Close agreement with reference solutions is demonstrated across all regimes. By building on JAX, the model benefits from just-in-time compilation and native GPU support. While JAX-SCM is not yet fully differentiable, basing it on JAX also lays the foundation for future integration with machine learning components. The model is designed for simplicity and modularity, lowering the barrier to entry for users and developers alike. more
-
Deep Learning Surrogates for Emulating Stochastic Climate Tipping Dynamics¶
This work explores a dynamics-informed Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) as a data-driven surrogate for computationally intensive Earth system simulations. Focusing on multivariate time series...This work explores a dynamics-informed Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) as a data-driven surrogate for computationally intensive Earth system simulations. Focusing on multivariate time series describing global ocean transport, we demonstrate the surrogate's ability to forecast tip events across thousands of time steps. The data involve up to 21 non-stationary time series in addition to static covariates describing free parameters and initial conditions. Modifications to the architecture and objective function yield a surrogate that anticipates the timing of Atlantic and Pacific collapses to high fidelity and captures the stochastic uncertainty in transition timing across ensemble predictions. The learned surrogate achieves a 465x computational speedup over the numerical simulator while maintaining differentiability with respect to parameters and initial conditions. more
-
Training-Free Bayesian Filtering with Generative Emulators¶
Bayesian filtering is a well-known problem that aims to estimate plausible states of a dynamical system from observations. Among existing approaches to solve this problem, particle filters are...Bayesian filtering is a well-known problem that aims to estimate plausible states of a dynamical system from observations. Among existing approaches to solve this problem, particle filters are theoretically exact for non-linear dynamics and observations, but suffer from poor scalability in high dimensions. In this work, we show that diffusion-based emulators of dynamical systems can be used to implement, without additional training, an optimal variant of particle filters that has remained largely unexplored due to implementation challenges with classical numerical solvers. Experiments on nonlinear chaotic systems, including atmospheric dynamics, demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully scales particle filtering to high-dimensional settings. more
-
Unbox Responsible GeoAI: Navigating Climate Extreme and Disaster Mapping¶
As climate extreme and disaster events become more frequent and intense, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) has emerged as a transformative approach for large-scale disaster mapping and risk...As climate extreme and disaster events become more frequent and intense, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) has emerged as a transformative approach for large-scale disaster mapping and risk reduction. However, the purely mechanical, performance-driven deployment of GeoAI models can result in amplifying inherent spatial inequalities, preventing effective emergency decision-making, and producing severe environmental carbon footprint. To unbox the concept of responsible GeoAI, this position paper examines its emerging role, e.g., in climate extreme and disaster mapping, from a critical GIS perspective. We address the nexus of responsible GeoAI into four interrelated theoretical dimensions, specifically Representativeness, Explainability, Sustainability, and Ethics, with examples from climate extreme and disaster mapping. Moreover, targeting at the operational practice, we then propose a conceptual governance Model of responsible GeoAI that categorizes its governance practices into Data, Application, and Society scopes. Last, this position paper aims to raise the attention in the broader GIS community that the future of climate resilience relies not just on building better algorithms, but on fostering a governance ecosystem where GeoAI is deployed responsibly, ethically, and sustainably. more
-
Data-Driven Modelling to predict forest fire spread in the Patagonian region in Argentina¶
Wildfires are among the most severe disturbances affecting forest ecosystems, with over 50,000 hectares burned in Patagonia, Argentina, during 2025 alone. This study implements a...Wildfires are among the most severe disturbances affecting forest ecosystems, with over 50,000 hectares burned in Patagonia, Argentina, during 2025 alone. This study implements a Reaction-Diffusion-Convection (RDC) model to simulate wildfire spread in the Steffen and Martin Lakes area, a region severely impacted by fires. By integrating high-resolution maps of slope, wind velocity, and vegetation, we conducted three computational experiments of increasing complexity to simulate fire propagation across heterogeneous landscapes. We employed a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to recover reference model parameters by maximizing the spatial overlap between simulated and reference burned areas. Subsequently, parameter estimates were refined using XGBoost to improve accuracy. Results demonstrate that the GA accurately recovers reference parameters across all scenarios, while the XGBoost fine-tuning significantly enhances accuracy in simpler cases. This integrated framework offers a systematic approach for estimating difficult-to-measure wildfire parameters, demonstrating the potential of hybrid computational methods for wildfire modeling and forest management. more
-
K-MetBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Expert Reasoning, Locality, and Multimodality in Meteorology¶
The development of practical (multimodal) large language model assistants for Korean weather forecasters is hindered by the absence of a multidimensional, expert-level evaluation framework grounded...The development of practical (multimodal) large language model assistants for Korean weather forecasters is hindered by the absence of a multidimensional, expert-level evaluation framework grounded in authoritative sources. To address this, we introduce K-MetBench, a diagnostic benchmark grounded in national qualification exams. It exposes critical gaps across four dimensions: expert visual reasoning of charts, logical validity via expert-verified rationales, Korean-specific geo-cultural comprehension, and fine-grained domain analysis. Our evaluation of 55 models reveals a profound modality gap in interpreting specialized diagrams and a reasoning gap where models hallucinate logic despite correct predictions. Crucially, Korean models outperform significantly larger global models in local contexts, demonstrating that parameter scaling alone cannot resolve cultural dependencies. K-MetBench serves as a roadmap for developing reliable, culturally aware expert AI agents. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/soyeonbot/K-MetBench . more
-
Interpretable Physics-Informed Load Forecasting for U.S. Grid Resilience: SHAP-Guided Ensemble Validation in Hybrid Deep Learning Under Extreme Weather¶
Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is a cornerstone of U.S. grid reliability; however, prevailing deep learning models remain opaque, limiting operator trust during extreme weather. A...Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is a cornerstone of U.S. grid reliability; however, prevailing deep learning models remain opaque, limiting operator trust during extreme weather. A unified, interpretable, physics-informed ensemble framework is proposed, integrating a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) branch for local feature extraction and a Transformer branch for long-range dependency modeling; the branches are fused through a validation-optimized weighted ensemble and regularized by a physics-informed loss derived from the piecewise parabolic temperature-demand relationship of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) system. Post-hoc interpretability is provided through SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) with the DeepExplainer backend, yielding global and event-level attributions. Using eight years of ERCOT hourly load data (2018-2025) fused with Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) records from three Texas stations, the framework achieves 713 MW MAE, 812 MW RMSE, and 1.18% MAPE on the test window. For Hampel-flagged extreme events, MAPE falls by 20.7% relative to its Transformer branch and by 40.5% relative to its CNN branch; an ablation confirms that the parabolic and ramp constraints drive a 14.7% RMSE reduction. SHAP analysis reveals a regime shift: temperature dominates under normal operation, whereas wind speed and precipitation become more influential during cold fronts and heatwaves. more
-
Eco-Bee: A Personalised Multi-Modal Agent for Advancing Student Climate Awareness and Sustainable Behaviour in Campus Ecosystems¶
Universities are microcosms of urban ecosystems, with concentrated consumption patterns in food, transport, energy, and product usage. These environments not only contribute substantially to...Universities are microcosms of urban ecosystems, with concentrated consumption patterns in food, transport, energy, and product usage. These environments not only contribute substantially to sustainability pressures but also provide a unique opportunity to advance sustainability education and behavioural change at scale. As in most sectors, digital sustainability initiatives within universities remain narrowly focused on carbon calculations, typically providing static feedback that limits opportunities for sustained behavioural change. To address this gap, we propose Eco-Bee, integrating large language models, a translation of the Planetary Boundaries framework (as Eco-Score), and a conversational agent that connects individual choices to environmental limits. Tailored for students at the cusp of lifelong habits, Eco-Bee delivers actionable insights, peer benchmarking, and gamified challenges to sustain engagement and drive measurable progress toward boundary-aligned living. In a pilot tested across multiple campus networks (n=52), 96% of the student participants supported a campus-wide rollout and reported a clearer understanding of how daily behaviours collectively impact the planet's limits. By embedding planetary science, behavioural reinforcement, and AI-driven personalisation into a single platform, Eco-Bee establishes a scalable foundation for climate-conscious universities and future AI-mediated sustainability infrastructures. more
-
Heuristic Style Transfer for Real-Time, Efficient Weather Attribute Detection¶
We present lightweight and efficient architectures to detect weather conditions from RGB images, predicting the weather type (sunny, rain, snow, fog) and 11 complementary attributes such as...We present lightweight and efficient architectures to detect weather conditions from RGB images, predicting the weather type (sunny, rain, snow, fog) and 11 complementary attributes such as intensity, visibility, and ground condition, for a total of 53 classes across the tasks. This work examines to what extent weather conditions manifest as variations in visual style. We investigate style-inspired techniques, including Gram matrices, a truncated ResNet-50 targeting lower and intermediate layers, and PatchGAN-style architectures, within a multi-task framework with attention mechanisms. Two families are introduced: RTM (ResNet50-Truncated-MultiTasks) and PMG (PatchGAN-MultiTasks-Gram), together with their variants. Our contributions include automation of Gram-matrix computation, integration of PatchGAN into supervised multi-task learning, and local style capture through local Gram for improved spatial coherence. We also release a dataset of 503,875 images annotated with 12 weather attributes under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. The models achieve F1 scores above 96 percent on our internal test set and above 78 percent in zero-shot evaluation on several external datasets, confirming their generalization ability. The PMG architecture, with fewer than 5 million parameters, runs in real time with a small memory footprint, making it suitable for embedded systems. The modular design of the models also allows style-related or weather-related tasks to be added or removed as needed. more
-
Beyond Weather Correlation: A Comparative Study of Static and Temporal Neural Architectures for Fine-Grained Residential Energy Consumption Forecasting in Melbourne, Australia¶
Accurate short-term residential energy consumption forecasting at sub-hourly resolution is critical for smart grid management, demand response programmes, and renewable energy integration. While...Accurate short-term residential energy consumption forecasting at sub-hourly resolution is critical for smart grid management, demand response programmes, and renewable energy integration. While weather variables are widely acknowledged as key drivers of residential electricity demand, the relative merit of incorporating temporal autocorrelation - the sequential memory of past consumption; over static meteorological features alone remains underexplored at fine-grained (5-minute) temporal resolution for Australian households. This paper presents a rigorous empirical comparison of a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent network applied to two real-world Melbourne households: House 3 (a standard grid-connected dwelling) and House 4 (a rooftop solar photovoltaic-integrated household). Both models are trained on 14 months of 5-minute interval smart meter data (March 2023-April 2024) merged with official Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) daily weather observations, yielding over 117,000 samples per household. The LSTM, operating on 24-step (2-hour) sliding consumption windows, achieves coefficients of determination of R^2 = 0.883 (House 3) and R^2 = 0.865 (House 4), compared to R^2 = -0.055 and R^2 = 0.410 for the corresponding weather-driven MLPs - differences of 93.8 and 45.5 percentage points. These results establish that temporal autocorrelation in the consumption sequence dominates meteorological information for short-term forecasting at 5-minute granularity. Additionally, we demonstrate an asymmetry introduced by solar generation: for the PV-integrated household, the MLP achieves R^2 = 0.410, revealing implicit solar forecasting from weather-time correlations. A persistence baseline analysis and seasonal stratification contextualise model performance. We propose a hybrid weather-augmented LSTM and federated learning extensions as directions for future work. more
-
Data-driven Urban Surface Classification Elucidates Global City Heterogeneity¶
Accurate urban surface characterization is essential for environmental modeling, risk assessment, and climate adaptation. However, existing classifications of urban surfaces lack the global...Accurate urban surface characterization is essential for environmental modeling, risk assessment, and climate adaptation. However, existing classifications of urban surfaces lack the global consistency and physical detail to fully represent present-day urban heterogeneity. To address this need, we developed a globally unified, Data-driven Urban Environmental Zone (DUEZ) framework. By applying unsupervised clustering to high-resolution (500-m) datasets of building morphology, vegetation, and surface imperviousness, we classified global urban surfaces into 27 DUEZs, representing the exposure setting for approximately 85% of the global population. Compared to the Local Climate Zone scheme, DUEZ framework provides a more detailed representation of urban form, capturing the fine-scale mixing of built and vegetated surfaces in modern cities. Further aggregation of DUEZ patterns revealed nine predominant urban textures globally with regional differences and socioeconomic relevance. The DUEZ framework enhances physical representation of complex urban surfaces in numerical models and establishes a consistent, data-driven basis for global urban environmental studies. more
-
A solver-in-the-loop framework for end-to-end differentiable coastal hydrodynamics¶
Numerical simulation of wave propagation and run-up is a cornerstone of coastal engineering and tsunami hazard assessment. However, applying these forward models to inverse problems, such as...Numerical simulation of wave propagation and run-up is a cornerstone of coastal engineering and tsunami hazard assessment. However, applying these forward models to inverse problems, such as bathymetry estimation, source inversion, and structural optimization, remains notoriously difficult due to the rigidity and high computational cost of deriving discrete adjoints. In this paper, we introduce AegirJAX, a fully differentiable hydrodynamic solver based on the depth-integrated, non-hydrostatic shallow-water equations. By implementing the solver entirely within a reverse-mode automatic differentiation framework, AegirJAX treats the time-marching physics loop as a continuous computational graph. We demonstrate the framework's versatility across a suite of scientific machine learning tasks: (1) discovering regime-specific neural corrections for model misspecifications in highly dispersive wave propagation; (2) performing continuous topology optimization for breakwater design; (3) training recurrent neural networks in-the-loop for active wave cancellation; and (4) inverting hidden bathymetry and submarine landslide kinematics directly from downstream sensor data. The proposed differentiable paradigm fundamentally blurs the line between forward simulation and inverse optimization, offering a unified, end-to-end framework for coastal hydrodynamics. more
-
PASM: Population Adaptive Symbolic Mixture-of-Experts Model for Cross-location Hurricane Evacuation Decision Prediction¶
Accurate prediction of evacuation behavior is critical for disaster preparedness, yet models trained in one region often fail elsewhere. Using a multi-state hurricane evacuation survey, we show this...Accurate prediction of evacuation behavior is critical for disaster preparedness, yet models trained in one region often fail elsewhere. Using a multi-state hurricane evacuation survey, we show this failure goes beyond feature distribution shift: households with similar characteristics follow systematically different decision patterns across states. As a result, single global models overfit dominant responses, misrepresent vulnerable subpopulations, and generalize poorly across locations. We propose Population-Adaptive Symbolic Mixture-of-Experts (PASM), which pairs large language model guided symbolic regression with a mixture-of-experts architecture. PASM discovers human-readable closed-form decision rules, specializes them to data-driven subpopulations, and routes each input to the appropriate expert at inference time. On Hurricanes Harvey and Irma data, transferring from Florida and Texas to Georgia with 100 calibration samples, PASM achieves a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.607, compared to XGBoost (0.404), TabPFN (0.333), GPT-5-mini (0.434), and meta-learning baselines MAML and Prototypical Networks (MCC \(\leq\) 0.346). The routing mechanism assigns distinct formula archetypes to subpopulations, so the resulting behavioral profiles are directly interpretable. A fairness audit across four demographic axes finds no statistically significant disparities after Bonferroni correction. PASM closes more than half the cross-location generalization gap while keeping decision rules transparent enough for real-world emergency planning. more
-
Spectral-Aware Text-to-Time Series Generation with Billion-Scale Multimodal Meteorological Data¶
Text-to-time-series generation is particularly important in meteorology, where natural language offers intuitive control over complex, multi-scale atmospheric dynamics. Existing approaches are...Text-to-time-series generation is particularly important in meteorology, where natural language offers intuitive control over complex, multi-scale atmospheric dynamics. Existing approaches are constrained by the lack of large-scale, physically grounded multimodal datasets and by architectures that overlook the spectral-temporal structure of weather signals. We address these challenges with a unified framework for text-guided meteorological time-series generation. First, we introduce MeteoCap-3B, a billion-scale weather dataset paired with expert-level captions constructed via a Multi-agent Collaborative Captioning (MACC) pipeline, yielding information-dense and physically consistent annotations. Building on this dataset, we propose MTransformer, a diffusion-based model that enables precise semantic control by mapping textual descriptions into multi-band spectral priors through a Spectral Prompt Generator, which guides generation via frequency-aware attention. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art generation quality, accurate cross-modal alignment, strong semantic controllability, and substantial gains in downstream forecasting under data-sparse and zero-shot settings. Additional results on general time-series benchmarks indicate that the proposed framework generalizes beyond meteorology. more
-
Contrastive Learning Boosts Deterministic and Generative Models for Weather Data¶
Weather data, comprising multiple variables, poses significant challenges due to its high dimensionality and multimodal nature. Creating low-dimensional embeddings requires compressing this data into...Weather data, comprising multiple variables, poses significant challenges due to its high dimensionality and multimodal nature. Creating low-dimensional embeddings requires compressing this data into a compact, shared latent space. This compression is required to improve the efficiency and performance of downstream tasks, such as forecasting or extreme-weather detection. Self-supervised learning, particularly contrastive learning, offers a way to generate low-dimensional, robust embeddings from unlabelled data, enabling downstream tasks when labelled data is scarce. Despite initial exploration of contrastive learning in weather data, particularly with the ERA5 dataset, the current literature does not extensively examine its benefits relative to alternative compression methods, notably autoencoders. Moreover, current work on contrastive learning does not investigate how these models can incorporate sparse data, which is more common in real-world data collection. It is critical to explore and understand how contrastive learning contributes to creating more robust embeddings for sparse weather data, thereby improving performance on downstream tasks. Our work extensively explores contrastive learning on the ERA5 dataset, aligning sparse samples with complete ones via a contrastive loss term to create SPARse-data augmented conTRAstive spatiotemporal embeddings (SPARTA). We introduce a temporally aware batch sampling strategy and a cycle-consistency loss to improve the structure of the latent space. Furthermore, we propose a novel graph neural network fusion technique to inject domain-specific physical knowledge. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that contrastive learning is a feasible and advantageous compression method for sparse geoscience data, thereby enhancing performance in downstream tasks. more
-
Climate Prompting: Generating the Madden-Julian Oscillation using Video Diffusion and Low-Dimensional Conditioning¶
Generative Deep Learning is a powerful tool for modeling of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in the tropics, yet its relationship to traditional theoretical frameworks remains poorly understood....Generative Deep Learning is a powerful tool for modeling of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in the tropics, yet its relationship to traditional theoretical frameworks remains poorly understood. Here we propose a video diffusion model, trained on atmospheric reanalysis, to synthetize long MJO sequences conditioned on key low-dimensional metrics. The generated MJOs capture key features including composites, power spectra and multiscale structures including convectively coupled waves, despite some bias. We then prompt the model to generate more tractable MJOs based on intentionally idealized low-dimensional conditionings, for example a perpetual MJO, an isolated modulation by seasons and/or the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, and so on. This enables deconstructing the underlying processes and identifying physical drivers. The present approach provides a practical framework for bridging the gap between low-dimensional MJO theory and high-resolution atmospheric complexity and will help tropical atmosphere prediction. more
-
Agentic workflow enables the recovery of critical materials from complex feedstocks via selective precipitation¶
We present a multi-agentic workflow for critical materials recovery that deploys a series of AI agents and automated instruments to recover critical materials from produced water and magnet...We present a multi-agentic workflow for critical materials recovery that deploys a series of AI agents and automated instruments to recover critical materials from produced water and magnet leachates. This approach achieves selective precipitation from real-world feedstocks using simple chemicals, accelerating the development of efficient, adaptable, and scalable separations to a timeline of days, rather than months and years. more