[HN Gopher] Aurora, a foundation model for the Earth system
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Aurora, a foundation model for the Earth system
Author : rmason
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-06-05 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The release blog post is here[1], model code released under MIT
| license here[2], along with weights on Huggingface, and some
| documentation here[3].
|
| As a layman I've been following deep neural nets being used to
| solve quantum physics problems, where they do quite well for
| certain classes of hard problems, so perhaps not terribly
| surprising they do well with weather prediction as well I
| suppose.
|
| [1]: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/microsofts-
| aur...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/microsoft/aurora
|
| [3]: https://microsoft.github.io/aurora/intro.html
| tomhow wrote:
| Also, research paper in Nature:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09005-y
| scottcha wrote:
| The are many great things about Aurora, here are a few as I've
| been using it since it came out. 1. Its open source & open
| weights and free to use non-commercially. 2. Its configurable to
| easily fit on my local gpu for development purposes. 3. I've also
| gotten great engagement from the repo owners.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/vl87I
| roger_ wrote:
| Been following wesselb on GitHub for a while, great to see his
| work getting more attention!
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| AI weather is making great progress with the likes of GraphCast,
| Aardvark, NeuralGCM, Aurora, etc. It seems like the teams that
| produce these models often include folks from Microsoft and
| Google, which makes me wonder if there's much cross pollination
| within those companies which is helping these advances or if
| researchers are siloed and the development of these models is
| entirely independent of one another?
| goochphd wrote:
| Very cool project. There are some presentations by the PI on
| youtube that I recommend searching for. One of the interesting
| takeaways I had was that they were able to do better with
| mesoscale phenomena and extreme weather prediction than the other
| players (like Graphcast and Pangu and FourCastNet), in part due
| to their technique for training a higher resolution data space
| (0.1 deg vs 0.25 or 0.5). I also found it interesting that they
| were able to show a scaling relationship where performance
| increased by 5% every time they doubled the model size - and
| their loss was still improving when they had to cut it off due to
| cost constraints.
|
| Very cool stuff!
| xnx wrote:
| Is this similar to Google's model?
| https://research.google/blog/zooming-in-efficient-regional-e...
| sieste wrote:
| Impressive. However, I don't like how AI foundation models are
| always advertised as alternatives to "traditional" (physics
| based) forecasting. Virtually all AI weather models are trained
| on ERA5 reanalysis, which is a blend of observations and
| numerical model forecasts. Without a good global numerical model
| of the atmosphere there would be no AI model. I wish this synergy
| were emphasised more, rather than always going straight for the
| easy "AI beats physics!!1!" headline.
| xpe wrote:
| I agree... the public and leaders need to know how the training
| data is generated: a combination of sensors and physics-based
| simulation models. Lacking this context could lead to poor
| decisions around research prioritization and funding.
| tndl wrote:
| Things are changing quickly in this area. Several
| projects/companies working on AI data assimilation (an
| alternative route to creating analysis data like ERA5)[0].
|
| Also a lot of companies working on the data collection side,
| replacing/augmenting government data collection. Spire's an
| example of this in the space domain, and Windborne and Sorcerer
| (my company) do weather balloons.
|
| [0]: E.g. Brightband's AIDA
| (https://www.brightband.com/blog/aida/) and Project Aardvark
| (https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/project-aardvark-
| reimagining-a...)
| waltbosz wrote:
| Does this title make anyone else's Asimov senses tingle? In the
| book "Foundation and Earth", the protagonists travel from planet
| Aurora to planet Earth.
| dmillard wrote:
| Two of the authors of the original Aurora system left Microsoft
| to found https://silurian.ai/ - interesting to keep tabs on if
| you're interested in this space!
| dunkeltaenzer wrote:
| We do we advertise for paywalled content here?
| croemer wrote:
| Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09005-y
| nxobject wrote:
| As superficial an application as this sounds, I wonder if this be
| used to make a fun sandbox simulation game...
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