TITLE: ClimART: A Benchmark Dataset for Emulating Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Weather and Climate Models 

ABSTRACT: Numerical simulations of Earth's weather and climate require substantial
amounts of computation. This has led to a growing interest in replacing
subroutines that explicitly compute physical processes with approximate machine
learning (ML) methods that are fast at inference time. Within weather and
climate models, atmospheric radiative transfer (RT) calculations are especially
expensive. This has made them a popular target for neural network-based
emulators. However, prior work is hard to compare due to the lack of a
comprehensive dataset and standardized best practices for ML benchmarking. To
fill this gap, we build a large dataset, ClimART, with more than \emph{10
million samples from present, pre-industrial, and future climate conditions},
based on the Canadian Earth System Model. ClimART poses several methodological
challenges for the ML community, such as multiple out-of-distribution test
sets, underlying domain physics, and a trade-off between accuracy and inference
speed. We also present several novel baselines that indicate shortcomings of
datasets and network architectures used in prior work. Download instructions,
baselines, and code are available at: https://github.com/RolnickLab/climart
Numerical simulations of Earth's weather and climate require substantial
amounts of computation. This has led to a growing interest in replacing
subroutines that explicitly compute physical processes with approximate machine
learning (ML) methods that are fast at inference time. Within weather and
climate models, atmospheric radiative transfer (RT) calculations are especially
expensive. This has made them a popular target for neural network-based
emulators. However, prior work is hard to compare due to the lack of a
comprehensive dataset and standardized best practices for ML benchmarking. To
fill this gap, we build a large dataset, ClimART, with more than \emph{10
million samples from present, pre-industrial, and future climate conditions},
based on the Canadian Earth System Model. ClimART poses several methodological
challenges for the ML community, such as multiple out-of-distribution test
sets, underlying domain physics, and a trade-off between accuracy and inference
speed. We also present several novel baselines that indicate shortcomings of
datasets and network architectures used in prior work. Download instructions,
baselines, and code are available at: https://github.com/RolnickLab/climart
ClimART: A Benchmark Dataset for Emulating Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Weather and Climate Models
http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14671v1