Symmetric Composition of Anisotropic Operators for Global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Forecasting

arXiv:2602.15040 · physics.ao-ph, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-02-04 · Read on arXiv

physics.ao-ph, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-02-04

Updated: 2026-09-27

Code: https://github.com/ecmwf-lab/aimodels

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Accurate global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) climate forecasting is critical for disaster preparedness and resource management, yet it remains challenging due to chaotic atmospheric dynamics.

Terminology

Abstract

Accurate global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) climate forecasting is critical for disaster preparedness and resource management, yet it remains challenging due to chaotic atmospheric dynamics. Despite advances in geometry-aware representations, existing methods do not specify how the zonal and meridional interactions that govern real atmospheric dynamics should be explicitly coordinated and composed, leaving an important architectural gap for S2S forecasting. In this paper, we propose AnisoCast, which explicitly models anisotropic global atmospheric dynamics for accurate S2S climate forecasting. It couples: (1) an Anisotropic Embedding strategy that tokenizes the global grid into latitudinal rings, preserving the integrity of zonal periodic structures; and (2) stacked Aniso Blocks that arrange latent Zonal and Meridional Operators in a weight-shared palindromic composition inspired by symmetric operator splitting. Extensive experiments on the ERA5 reanalysis dataset demonstrate that AnisoCast establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in both forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency.

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