When Geoscience Meets Foundation Models: Towards General Geoscience Artificial Intelligence System

TL;DR

This paper reviews the emergence of geoscience foundation models (GFMs), highlighting their potential to revolutionize Earth system modeling through large-scale, data-centric AI approaches that integrate diverse data sources and advanced techniques.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of GFM construction, recent advancements, and future challenges, emphasizing the intersection of AI and geoscience for enhanced Earth system understanding.

Findings

GFMs leverage large-scale data and transformer architectures.

Recent advancements include large language, vision, and vision-language models.

GFMs face challenges in data integration, model complexity, and uncertainty quantification.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced Earth sciences, yet its full potential in to comprehensively modeling Earth's complex dynamics remains unrealized. Geoscience foundation models (GFMs) emerge as a paradigm-shifting solution, integrating extensive cross-disciplinary data to enhance the simulation and understanding of Earth system dynamics. These data-centric AI models extract insights from petabytes of structured and unstructured data, effectively addressing the complexities of Earth systems that traditional models struggle to capture. The unique strengths of GFMs include flexible task specification, diverse input-output capabilities, and multi-modal knowledge representation, enabling analyses that surpass those of individual data sources or traditional AI methods. This review not only highlights the key advantages of GFMs, but also presents essential techniques for their construction, with a focus on transformers, pre-training, and adaptation strategies. Subsequently, we examine recent advancements in GFMs, including large language models, vision models, and vision-language models, particularly emphasizing the potential applications in remote sensing. Additionally, the review concludes with a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and future trends in GFMs, addressing five critical aspects: data integration, model complexity, uncertainty quantification, interdisciplinary collaboration, and concerns related to privacy, trust, and security. This review offers a comprehensive overview of emerging geoscientific research paradigms, emphasizing the untapped opportunities at the intersection of advanced AI techniques and geoscience. It examines major methodologies, showcases advances in large-scale models, and discusses the challenges and prospects that will shape the future landscape of GFMs.