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Crowdsourcing the Frontier: Advancing Hybrid Physics-ML Climate Simulation via a $50,000 Kaggle Competition

delete2026-05-13
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OA
AI
J
Jerry Chun‐Wei Lin *
Z
Zeyuan Hu
T
Tom Beucler
F
Frields, Katherine
H
Hannah Christensen
W
Walter M. Hannah
H
H Heuer
U
Ukkonen, Peter
L
Laura Mansfield
T
Tian Zheng
L
Liran Peng
R
Ritwik Gupta
P
Pierre Gentine
A
Al-Naher, Yusef
D
Duan, Mingjiang
H
Hattori, Kyo
J
Ji, Weiliang
L
Li, Chunhan
M
Matsuda, Kippei
M
Murakami, Naoki
R
Ron, Shlomo
S
Serlin, Marec
S
Song, Hongjian
T
Tanabe, Yuma
D
Daisuke Yamamoto
Z
Zhou, Jianyao
P
Pritchard, Mike
DOI:10.1029/2025MS005643delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Subgrid machine-learning (machine learning [ML]) parameterizations have the potential to introduce a new generation of climate models that incorporate the effects of higher-resolution physics without incurring the prohibitive computational cost associated with more explicit physics-based simulations. However, important issues, ranging from online instability to inconsistent online performance, have limited their operational use for long-term climate projections. To more rapidly drive progress in solving these issues, domain scientists and ML researchers opened up the offline aspect of this problem to the broader ML and data science community with the release of ClimSim, a NeurIPS Data sets and Benchmarks publication, and an associated Kaggle competition. This paper reports on the downstream results of the Kaggle competition by coupling emulators inspired by the winning teams' architectures to an interactive climate model (including full cloud microphysics, a regime historically prone to online instability) and systematically evaluating their online performance. Our results demonstrate that online stability in the low-resolution real-geography setting is reproducible across multiple diverse architectures, which we consider a key milestone. All tested architectures exhibit strikingly similar offline and online biases, though their responses to architecture-agnostic design choices (e.g., expanding the list of input variables) can differ significantly. Multiple Kaggle-inspired architectures achieve state-of-the-art results on certain metrics such as zonal mean bias patterns and global Root Mean Squared Error, indicating that crowdsourcing the essence of the offline problem is one path to improving online performance in hybrid physics-AI climate simulation.
Keywords:
hybrid
physics
machine learning
superparameterization
MMF
kaggle
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Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems cover
Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
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