Sustainable Biz - Magazine - Page 14
T-Mobile Announces 2040
Net-Zero Commitment
I
BM have announced a new AI
foundation model for a variety
of weather and climate use cases,
available in open-source to the
scientific, developer, and business
communities. Developed by IBM and
NASA, with contributions from Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, 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.
Because of its unique design and training
regime, the weather and climate foundation
model can tackle far more applications than
existing weather AI models, as outlined in a
paper recently published on arXiv, "Prithvi
WxC: Foundation Model for Weather and
Climate." Potential applications include
creating targeted forecasts based on local
observations, detecting and predicting
severe weather patterns, improving
the spatial resolution of global climate
simulations, and improving how physical
14
processes are represented in numerical
weather and climate models. In one
experiment in the above identified paper, the
foundation model accurately reconstructed
global surface temperatures from a random
sample of only five percent original data,
suggesting a broader application to problems
in data assimilation.
This model was pre-trained on 40 years
of Earth observation data from NASA's
Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for
Research and Applications, Version 2
(MERRA-2). As a foundation model, it has
a unique architecture which allows it to
be fine-tuned to global, regional, and local
scales. This flexibility makes it suited for a
range of weather studies.
The foundation model is available for
download on Hugging Face, along with two
fine-tuned versions of the model that tackle
specific scientific and industry-relevant
applications. These are:
Climate and weather data downscaling:
S U S TA I N A B L E B I Z M A G A Z I N E
MAY 2025
With 40 years of Earth
observation data and a
flexible AI architecture,
this model enables
hyperlocal forecasting,
gravity wave analysis, and
scalable climate research
— supporting decisions
from daily weather to
long-term environmental
strategy.
