Papers › Challenges of learning multi-scale dynamics with AI weather models: Implications for...
Challenges of learning multi-scale dynamics with AI weather models: Implications for stability and one solution
Ashesh Chattopadhyay, Y. Qiang Sun, Pedram Hassanzadeh
Long-term stability and physical consistency are critical properties for AI-based weather models if they are going to be used for subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasts or beyond, e.g., climate change projection. However, current AI-based weather models can only provide short-term forecasts accurately since they become unstable or physically inconsistent when time-integrated beyond a few weeks or a few months. Either they exhibit numerical blow-up or hallucinate unrealistic dynamics of the atmospheric variables, akin to the current class of autoregressive large language models. The cause of the instabilities is unknown, and the methods that are used to improve their stability horizons are ad-hoc and lack rigorous theory. In this paper, we reveal that the universal causal mechanism for these instabilities in any turbulent flow is due to \textit{spectral bias} wherein, \textit{any} deep learning architecture is biased to learn only the large-scale dynamics and ignores the small scales completely. We further elucidate how turbulence physics and the absence of convergence in deep learning-based time-integrators amplify this bias, leading to unstable error propagation. Finally, using the quasi-geostrophic flow and European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) Reanalysis data as test cases, we bridge the gap between deep learning theory and numerical analysis to propose one mitigative solution to such unphysical behavior. We develop long-term physically-consistent data-driven models for the climate system and demonstrate accurate short-term forecasts, and hundreds of years of time-integration with accurate mean and variability.
In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.
Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
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