Samudra 2: Scaling Ocean Emulators across Resolutions

Abstract

Ocean general circulation models (OGCMs) are essential to climate science but computationally expensive, limiting ensemble size and forcing scenarios. Neural emulators promise orders-of-magnitude speedups, yet existing ocean emulators have not combined fine spatial resolution with multi-year autoregressive rollouts. Samudra, the first autoregressive neural ocean emulator to produce multi-decade global rollouts, is limited to $1^\circ$ resolution and exhibits two long-horizon failure modes: \emph{variance collapse}, the loss of temporal variability, and \emph{imprinting artifacts}, in which velocity patterns leak into deep-ocean fields. We present Samudra 2, which introduces a wider U-Net backbone with modified ConvNeXt-style blocks and a reduced block-internal expansion factor, together with a dynamic loss that reweights output channels according to their prediction errors, strengthening gradients for slow-evolving deep-ocean fields. At $1^\circ$, Samudra 2 increases upper-ocean global-mean temperature $R^2$ from 0.56 to 0.87 and reduces deep-ocean temperature error by roughly sevenfold. The same architecture scales to $1/2^\circ$ and $1/4^\circ$ over approximately 8-year autoregressive rollouts, recovering mesoscale eddies and sharp western boundary currents. Running on a single GPU, Samudra 2 enables larger ensembles for sea-level projections, ocean heat uptake, and climate variability studies. All artifacts are publicly available: project page, code, checkpoints, documentation.