Poster
in
Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Fostering the Maturity of ML Applications for Climate Change
AI-driven emulation of ocean dynamics on sub-seasonal scales
Suyash Bire · Jean Kossaifi · Simone Silvestri · Nikola Kovachki · Kamyar Azizzadenesheli · Chris Hill · Anima Anandkumar
Climate forecasting systems rely on coupling atmospheric models to ocean and sea ice models. However, while there have recently been significant efforts to accelerate atmospheric models using AI, there have been very scarce efforts to accelerate the latter. As a result, climate forecasting systems still rely on expensive numerical simulations, which renders large-scale ensembling and probabilistic prediction cumbersome. To address this issue, we propose a large-scale AI model of ocean dynamics. Our method relies on a spherical neural operator to accurately capture the functional nature of ocean dynamics on the sphere. We empirically demonstrate that our model can accurately predict ocean dynamics for sub-seasonal horizons and outperforms the existing method. It offers a 60x speedup over the fastest numerical solver currently used for the task.