NIVA: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Actionable Earth System Intelligence

Researchers introduced NIVA, a multimodal foundation model for Earth system intelligence, trained on large-scale simulations to learn coupled dynamics between ocean and atmosphere. The model captures key climate variability modes and aims to extend weather predictability beyond two weeks.

arXiv:2606.28546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in AI-driven weather and climate modeling have improved forecast skill while reducing computational cost. However, existing data-driven approaches are limited in their ability to model coupled Earth system dynamics, which is required for extending predictability beyond the ~2-week horizon. To address this, we introduce NIVA, a multimodal foundation model designed to learn unified representations across Earth system components. While the full framework targets atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land interactions, we focus here on a two-modality setting ocean and atmosphere as a controlled proof of concept to evaluate whether foundation models can learn coupled dynamics. Trained on large-scale Earth system simulations, NIVA learns physically meaningful cross-modal structure, providing a foundation for subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction. As initial validation, we show that NIVA captures key modes of climate variability through accurate prediction of major climate indices.