AI-boosted rare event sampling to characterize extreme weather

Abstract

Weather extremes pose major societal risks, especially in a changing climate, but due to their rarity, they are difficult to study using limited observations or complex climate models. We introduce AI+RES, a framework coupling fast AI weather forecasts with a high-fidelity physics model using a rare-event algorithm to efficiently characterize extremes. This approach enables the study of the statistics and physics of very rare events, such as once per millennium heatwaves at two orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. AI+RES can be applied broadly across climate science and other fields concerned with rare events.