ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation

NeurIPS 2023 · Sungduk Yu, Walter Hannah, Liran Peng, Jerry Lin, Mohamed Aziz Bhouri, Ritwik Gupta, Björn Lütjens, Justus Christopher Will, Gunnar Behrens, Julius Busecke, Nora Loose, Charles I Stern, Tom Beucler, Bryce Harrop, Benjamin R Hillman, Andrea Jenney, Savannah Ferretti, Nana Liu, Anima Anandkumar, Noah D Brenowitz, Veronika Eyring, Nicholas Geneva, Pierre Gentine, Stephan Mandt, Jaideep Pathak, Akshay Subramaniam, Carl Vondrick, Rose Yu, Laure Zanna, Tian Zheng, Ryan Abernathey, Fiaz Ahmed, David C Bader, Pierre Baldi, Elizabeth Barnes, Christopher Bretherton, Peter Caldwell, Wayne Chuang, Yilun Han, Yu Huang, Fernando Iglesias-Suarez, Sanket Jantre, Karthik Kashinath, Marat Khairoutdinov, Thorsten Kurth, Nicholas Lutsko, Po-Lun Ma, Griffin Mooers, J. David Neelin, David Randall, Sara Shamekh, Mark A Taylor, Nathan Urban, Janni Yuval, Guang Zhang, Michael Pritchard ·

Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore's Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.