Ai2 has released HiRO-ACEv2, a climate-modeling system that generates global rain, wind and pressure data at three-kilometer resolution for roughly one three-hundredth of the cost of the X-SHiELD atmospheric simulator used as its reference.
The system combines ACE, which runs a coarse global simulation at 100-kilometer resolution, with HiROv2, an AI downscaler that adds fine spatial detail. Ai2 says the updated downscaler matches X-SHiELD’s high-resolution statistics within 3 percent even for values occurring only once in a million data points. It also reproduced hurricane energy over long simulations and generated recognizable storm eyes and rain bands, although winds and pressure around the eye remained less symmetrical.
Researchers can download the models and use tutorial notebooks, while a web demo provides pre-generated comparisons. The lower cost could make it practical to produce many decade-long simulations or focus on one region without repeatedly running an expensive physics model.
The main limitation is that HiRO learned from X-SHiELD and currently works only with the ACE version tuned to mimic that simulator. It cannot yet downscale historical observations or a warmer future climate. Ai2 plans to train it on additional simulations, including a world four degrees Celsius warmer, and add fields such as near-surface temperature, snow and ice.