Rescene-ESM: an Earth system model built around a frozen AI weather model

Abstract

Earth system models underpin climate projections, but their cost limits how many scenarios, ensemble members and impact pathways can be explored. Machine-learning weather models forecast as skillfully as physics-based models at a fraction of the cost, yet coupled to an ocean they have produced weak El Nino variability or have learned it from climate-model output, and none carries the climate through rivers to the people exposed to it. Here we present Rescene-ESM, an Earth system model whose coupler, YAHO, yokes a frozen 20.8-million-parameter AI weather model to physically formulated ocean, sea-ice, land, river, carbon and energy components constrained by observations. Adding the couplings one at a time shows what each contributes: over a climatological ocean the AI atmosphere varies from year to year by a third of the observed amount over the oceans, and an interactive mixed layer, an equatorial wave ocean, the residual of the observed sea surface temperature (SST) equation as stochastic forcing and the land's moisture flux raise this step by step and bring El Nino and its teleconnections, leaving the mean climate almost unchanged. The full model simulates about 1,000 years per day on one graphics processing unit, holds the observed climate for a thousand years without drift, reproduces the observed 1979-2022 global warming, carries forced change with a physically based structure around the frozen network (transient climate response 1.60 K), routes runoff to 212 river gauges with a median seasonal-cycle correlation of 0.79 and, driven by emissions, separates the heatwave exposure of an SSP1 and an SSP3 world by a factor of 4.7 in 2081-2100, three-quarters of it through the warmer climate.