Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. To help address this, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Caltech, and NVIDIA trained the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) deep learning model — which learns complex physical systems accurately and efficiently — to emulate atmospheric dynamics and provide high-fidelity extreme weather predictions across the globe a full five days in advance.
The researchers used decades of data from ERA5, the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts’ high-resolution Earth dataset, to train the FNO model, which was scaled up to 128 NVIDIA A100 GPUs on Perlmutter, the new HPC system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The team developed a global FNO weather forecasting model at 30-km resolution, an order of magnitude greater resolution than state-of-the-art deep learning Earth emulators. The model predicts wind velocities and pressures at multiple levels in the atmosphere up to 120 hours in advance with high fidelity. In a case study on the massive 2016 hurricane Matthew, the model’s predictions of the hurricane’s winds and track were within the uncertainties of the NOAA National Hurricane Center’s forecast cones. In addition, the model can predict the behavior of certain classes of extreme weather events across the globe days in advance in just 0.25 seconds on a single NVIDIA GPU.
Physics-informed deep learning models such as the FNO offer the potential for accurate predictions of the spatio-temporal evolution of the Earth system orders of magnitude faster than traditional numerical models. This is an ongoing effort, and the team is investigating the comparative accuracy of deep learning and traditional numerical weather models in collaboration with experts in atmospheric modeling and numerical weather prediction.