ClimateLLM: Efficient Weather Forecasting via Frequency-Aware Large Language Models

TL;DR

ClimateLLM introduces a frequency-aware large language model framework that enhances weather forecasting by capturing multi-scale spatiotemporal dependencies efficiently, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and computational cost.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel ClimateLLM model integrating Fourier-based frequency decomposition with LLMs and MoE mechanisms for improved multi-scale weather prediction.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art models in accuracy

Reduces computational costs significantly

Effectively models extreme weather events

Abstract

Weather forecasting is crucial for public safety, disaster prevention and mitigation, agricultural production, and energy management, with global relevance. Although deep learning has significantly advanced weather prediction, current methods face critical limitations: (i) they often struggle to capture both dynamic temporal dependencies and short-term abrupt changes, making extreme weather modeling difficult; (ii) they incur high computational costs due to extensive training and resource requirements; (iii) they have limited adaptability to multi-scale frequencies, leading to challenges when separating global trends from local fluctuations. To address these issues, we propose ClimateLLM, a foundation model for weather forecasting. It captures spatiotemporal dependencies via a cross-temporal and cross-spatial collaborative modeling framework that integrates Fourier-based frequency decomposition with Large Language Models (LLMs) to strengthen spatial and temporal modeling. Our framework uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism that adaptively processes different frequency components, enabling efficient handling of both global signals and localized extreme events. In addition, we introduce a cross-temporal and cross-spatial dynamic prompting mechanism, allowing LLMs to incorporate meteorological patterns across multiple scales effectively. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that ClimateLLM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and efficiency, as a scalable solution for global weather forecasting.