# AERIS: Argonne Earth Systems Model for Reliable and Skillful Predictions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13523/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Flow matching, time series and science, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 55 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Flow matching, time series and science](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/flow-matching-time-series-and-science/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08797/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11214/) (2022)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11277/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02954/) (2024)
- [Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers for Near-Infinite Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01889/) (2023)
- [ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10343/) (2023)
- [Reducing Activation Recomputation in Large Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05198/) (2022)
- [Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11081/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Swift: An Autoregressive Consistency Model for Efficient Weather Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25631/) (2025)
- [U-Cast: A Surprisingly Simple and Efficient Frontier Probabilistic AI Weather Forecaster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09041/) (2026)
- [Latent Generative Solvers for Generalizable Long-Term Physics Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11229/) (2026)
- [A Multimodal Vision Transformer-based Modeling Framework for Prediction of Fluid Flows in Energy Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02483/) (2026)
- [Dual-Scale Temporal Fusion Reveals Structured Predictability in Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Temperature Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06911/) (2026)
- [TERRA: A Hierarchical Parallel Training and Memory Orchestration Framework for High-Resolution AI-based Earth Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15211/) (2026)
- [4D Parallelism Unlocks Exascale Bayesian Neural Networks for High-Fidelity Atmospheric Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12815/) (2026)
- [Hapi: A Multivariable Land-Surface Transformer for Medium-Range Hydrological Forecasting at Continental Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22702/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative machine learning offers new opportunities to better understand complex Earth system dynamics. Recent diffusion-based methods address spectral biases and improve ensemble calibration in weather forecasting compared to deterministic methods, yet have so far proven difficult to scale stably at high resolutions. We introduce AERIS, a 1.3 to 80B parameter pixel-level Swin diffusion transformer to address this gap, and SWiPe, a generalizable technique that composes window parallelism with sequence and pipeline parallelism to shard window-based transformers without added communication cost or increased global batch size. On Aurora (10,080 nodes), AERIS sustains 10.21 ExaFLOPS (mixed precision) and a peak performance of 11.21 ExaFLOPS with 1 × 1 patch size on the 0.25deg ERA5 dataset, achieving 95.5% weak scaling efficiency, and 81.6% strong scaling efficiency. AERIS outperforms the IFS ENS and remains stable on seasonal scales to 90 days, highlighting the potential of billion-parameter diffusion models for weather and climate prediction.