A Scalable Real-Time Data Assimilation Framework for Predicting Turbulent Atmosphere Dynamics

AI-based foundation models like FourCastNet, GraphCast, ClimaX, and Pangu-Weather are revolutionizing weather and climate predictions but are not yet ready for operational use. Their limitation lies in the absence of a data assimilation system to incorporate real-time Earth system observations, crucial for accurately forecasting events like tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce a generic real-time data assimilation framework and demonstrate its end-to-end performance on the Frontier supercomputer. This framework comprises two primary modules: an ensemble score filter (EnSF), which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art data assimilation method, e.g., the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF); and a vision transformer-based surrogate capable of real-time adaptation through the integration of observational data. We demonstrate both the strong and weak scaling of our framework up to 1024 GPUs on the Exascale supercomputer, Frontier. Our results not only illustrate the framework’s exceptional scalability on high-performance computing systems, but also demonstrate the importance of supercomputers in real-time data assimilation for weather and climate predictions. Even though the proposed framework is tested only on a benchmark surface quasi-geostrophic (SQG) turbulence system, it has the potential to be combined with existing AI-based foundation models, making it suitable for future operational implementations.