Papers › Compressing multidimensional weather and climate data into neural networks

Compressing multidimensional weather and climate data into neural networks

22 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.12538archive 2025-07-28

Langwen Huang, Torsten Hoefler

Weather and climate simulations produce petabytes of high-resolution data that are later analyzed by researchers in order to understand climate change or severe weather. We propose a new method of compressing this multidimensional weather and climate data: a coordinate-based neural network is trained to overfit the data, and the resulting parameters are taken as a compact representation of the original grid-based data. While compression ratios range from 300x to more than 3,000x, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art compressor SZ3 in terms of weighted RMSE, MAE. It can faithfully preserve important large scale atmosphere structures and does not introduce artifacts. When using the resulting neural network as a 790x compressed dataloader to train the WeatherBench forecasting model, its RMSE increases by less than 2%. The three orders of magnitude compression democratizes access to high-resolution climate data and enables numerous new research directions.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

spcl/nncompression officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

MAE

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections