Poster
in
Workshop: NeurIPS 2024 Workshop: Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences
3D Cloud reconstruction through geospatially-aware Masked Autoencoders
Stella Girtsou · Emiliano Diaz · Lilli Freischem · Joppe Massant · Kyriaki-Margarita Bintsi · Giuseppe Castiglione · William Jones · Michael Eisinger · J. Emmanuel Johnson · Anna Jungbluth
Clouds play a key role in Earth's radiation balance with complex effects that introduce large uncertainties into climate models. Real-time 3D cloud data is essential for improving climate predictions. This study leverages geostationary imagery from MSG/SEVIRI and radar reflectivity measurements of cloud profiles from CloudSat/CPR to reconstruct 3D cloud structures. We first apply self-supervised learning (SSL) methods—Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and geospatially-aware SatMAE-on unlabelled MSG images, and then fine-tune our models on matched image-profile pairs. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods like U-Nets, and our geospatial encoding further improves prediction results, demonstrating the potential of SSL for cloud reconstruction.