ACE2: accurately learning subseasonal to decadal atmospheric variability and forced responses

Watt-Meyer, Oliver; Henn, Brian; McGibbon, Jeremy; Clark, Spencer K.; Kwa, Anna; Perkins, W. Andre; Wu, Elynn; Harris, Lucas; Bretherton, Christopher S.

doi:10.1038/s41612-025-01090-0

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ACE2: accurately learning subseasonal to decadal atmospheric variability and forced responses

2025
By Watt-Meyer, Oliver ; Henn, Brian ; McGibbon, Jeremy ; ...

Details

Journal Title:

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
Personal Author:

Watt-Meyer, Oliver ; Henn, Brian ; McGibbon, Jeremy ; Clark, Spencer K. ; Kwa, Anna ; Perkins, W. Andre ; Wu, Elynn ; Harris, Lucas ; Bretherton, Christopher S.
NOAA Program & Office:

OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research) ; GFDL (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory)
Description:

Existing machine learning models of weather variability are not formulated to enable assessment of their response to varying external boundary conditions such as sea surface temperature and greenhouse gases. Here we present ACE2 (Ai2 Climate Emulator version 2) and its application to reproducing atmospheric variability over the past 80 years on timescales from days to decades. ACE2 is a 450M-parameter autoregressive machine learning emulator, operating with 6-hour temporal resolution, 1° horizontal resolution and eight atmospheric vertical layers. It exactly conserves global dry air mass and moisture and can be stepped forward stably for arbitrarily many steps with a throughput of about 1500 simulated years per wall clock day. ACE2 generates emergent phenomena such as tropical cyclones, the Madden Julian Oscillation, and sudden stratospheric warmings. Furthermore, it accurately reproduces the atmospheric response to El Niño variability and global trends of temperature over the past 80 years. However, its sensitivities to separately changing sea surface temperature and carbon dioxide are not entirely realistic.
Source:

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, 8(1)
DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-025-01090-0
ISSN:

2397-3722
Format:

PDF
Publisher:

Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Document Type:

Journal Article
License:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Rights Information:

CC BY
Compliance:

Submitted
Main Document Checksum:

urn:sha-512:2419cc177f62bacf7d890ab3b04d6930ad6c06b61016ee5bad95e24ad173fb7a6f2046b71d3f41e1b08d3031b003f779c3b9166bdd7586eb9a7b8fa968417fb2
Download URL:

https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/71078/noaa_71078_DS1.pdf
File Type:

[PDF - 4.13 MB ]

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