Climate AI Nordics

Climate AI Nordics

Nordic network for collaborations around tackling climate change using AI and machine learning. NGO registered in Sweden.

Aurora: A foundation model of the Earth system

Event date: 2026-09-24

Event location:

Welcome to this week’s Learning Machines seminar.

This seminar is a collaboration between RISE and Climate AI Nordics – climateainordics.com.

Title: Aurora: A foundation model of the Earth system

Speaker: Ana Lucic, University of Amsterdam

Abstract: Reliable forecasting of the Earth system is essential for mitigating natural disasters and supporting human progress. Traditional numerical models, although powerful, are extremely computationally expensive1. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have shown promise in improving both predictive performance and efficiency, yet their potential remains underexplored in many Earth system domains. Here we introduce Aurora, a large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data. Aurora outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather, all at orders of magnitude lower computational cost. With the ability to be fine-tuned for diverse applications at modest expense, Aurora represents a notable step towards democratizing accurate and efficient Earth system predictions. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI in environmental forecasting and pave the way for broader accessibility to high-quality climate and weather information. Link to paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09005-y

About the speaker: Ana Lucic is an assistant professor in artificial intelligence at the University of Amsterdam working on interpretability, AI for science and AI safety. Previously, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research Amsterdam and at the Partnership on AI. She has a PhD in explainable machine learning from the University of Amsterdam, along with an MSc and BSc, both in mathematics, from McMaster University. Ana is a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and the Amsterdam ELLIS Unit. Her work has been published in venues such as Nature, ICML, AAAI, AISTATS, CVPR and FAccT.

Location: This is an online seminar. Connect using Zoom.

Date: 2026-09-24 15:00

Upcoming seminars:

  • 2026-10-08: Rangel Daroya, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • 2026-10-22: Luca Ciampi, ISTI-CNR
  • 2026-11-19: Nicola Messina, ISTI-CNR
  • 2026-12-17: Lester Jame Miranda, affiliation
  • All seminars are 15:00 CET.

More information and coming seminars: https://ri.se/lm-sem

– The Learning Machines Team

Published:

Categories:

You May Also Enjoy

Save the date: The 3rd Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate

Published:

Climate AI Nordics is happy to announce that our annual **_Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate_** returns again for a third time in 2027, this time in Oslo! Mark **April 22nd 2027** in your calendars, and stay tuned for more info to come!

Machine perception for scientific measurement from satellite imagery

Event date:

Webinar with Rangel Daroya, University of Massachusetts Amherst. In many scientific domains, the goal is not simply to classify an image or produce a visually plausible segmentation, but to estimate quantities that scientists and decision-makers can use: river width, water extent, sediment concentration, habitat change, or other physical variables. These tasks require models that are robust to distribution shift, efficient under limited supervision, and reliable enough to support downstream measurement. In this talk, I will discuss machine learning and computer vision methods for this setting, with a focus on geospatial imagery and hydrology. Scientific domains such as remote sensing expose several fundamental limitations of current vision systems. Models must operate across sensors, geographic regions, seasons, and acquisition conditions, often with limited labeled data and multispectral inputs that differ from standard natural image benchmarks. They must also detect small or thin structures, handle temporal variation, and avoid errors that may appear minor under conventional vision metrics but lead to substantial errors in scientific measurements. I will discuss three aspects that try to solve these problems: learning transferable representations that can adapt across tasks and datasets, developing data-efficient perception methods for multispectral and geospatial imagery, and translating model predictions into reliable physical measurements. I will highlight work on task transfer, satellite representation learning, river segmentation, and downstream estimation of river width and other hydrological variables. More broadly, this work aims to develop robust, transferable, and data-efficient machine perception systems that can turn large-scale satellite and scientific imagery into reliable measurements of the physical world.

Towards verified tree-level CO2 and H2O physiology, resolved at 30-min resolution

Event date:

Webinar with Jaime Caballer Revenga, University of Copenhagen. This project addresses one major challenge in climate science: accurately quantifying how forests remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. Forests currently account for nearly one-third of the global land carbon sink, but their capacity to absorb CO₂ is increasingly threatened by climate change(s), land-use change(s), and environmental disturbance(s). At the same time, afforestation, reforestation, and carbon offset initiatives are expanding rapidly, despite persistent concerns about the reliability and transparency of the methods used to estimate carbon sequestration. The INFOSCO project (Integrating Forest Structure and Carbon Observatories) proposes a new approach by shifting the focus from forest-scale carbon assessments to continuous physiological estimates at the level of individual trees. By combining ecosystem CO₂ flux observations, laser-based measurements of forest structure, and theory of plant physiological processes, it aims to estimate the contribution of each tree to overall forest carbon uptake. This will provide a more detailed and biologically grounded understanding of carbon sequestration while remaining consistent with established micrometeorological measurements and theory. Methodologically, the research integrates data and concepts from ecosystem ecology, laser proximal sensing, plant physiology, and statistical modelling into a unified framework. The core modelling strategy uses a Bayesian hierarchical structure to quantify uncertainties at multiple levels. By means of Dirichlet regression the method ensures that tree-level estimates are consistent with ecosystem-scale micrometeorological observations. Beyond improving carbon accounting, the project aims to bridge between detailed field-based ecological measurements and AI models scalable to biogeographic applications. By linking high-resolution observations of individual trees with ecosystem-atmosphere fluxes, it seeks to advance both our understanding of forest physiology and the development of more robust tools for monitoring and verifying nature-based climate solutions.

Climate AI Nordics Newsletter, August 2026

Published:

The August 2026 Climate AI Nordics newsletter celebrates a major organizational milestone with its official registration as a non-profit in Sweden. This edition spotlights featured member Aleksi Nummelin, a research professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute focused on ocean and climate dynamics. Readers can explore upcoming events, including the full schedule for the AICC-2 workshop and an AI for Planetary Health social at ECCV in Malmö. The issue also shares partner news spanning open-source climate risk engines, AI-driven building renovation research, and community mangrove conservation. Finally, several open positions are highlighted across the Nordic region for postdocs, PhD researchers, and machine learning engineers in climate and environmental AI.