# OmniCast: A Masked Latent Diffusion Model for Weather Forecasting Across Time Scales

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18707 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18707/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 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 29 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 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, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11214/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11838/) (2024)
- [MAGVIT: Masked Generative Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05199/) (2022)
- [ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10343/) (2023)
- [WeatherBench: A benchmark dataset for data-driven weather forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00469/) (2020)
- [FuXi: A cascade machine learning forecasting system for 15-day global weather forecast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12873/) (2023)
- [Neural General Circulation Models for Weather and Climate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07222/) (2023)
- [WeatherBench 2: A benchmark for the next generation of data-driven global weather models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15560/) (2023)
- [MAGE: MAsked Generative Encoder to Unify Representation Learning and Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09117/) (2022)
- [Towards Multi-spatiotemporal-scale Generalized PDE Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15616/) (2022)
- [GenCast: Diffusion-based ensemble forecasting for medium-range weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15796/) (2023)
- [FengWu: Pushing the Skillful Global Medium-range Weather Forecast beyond 10 Days Lead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02948/) (2023)
- [Forecasting Global Weather with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07575/) (2022)
- [Scaling transformer neural networks for skillful and reliable medium-range weather forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03876/) (2023)
- [GIVT: Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02116/) (2023)
- [UViM: A Unified Modeling Approach for Vision with Learned Guiding Codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10337/) (2022)
- [ChaosBench: A Multi-Channel, Physics-Based Benchmark for Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00712/) (2024)
- [Probabilistic Weather Forecasting with Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04759/) (2024)
- [SubseasonalClimateUSA: A Dataset for Subseasonal Forecasting and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10399/) (2021)
- [Improving Subseasonal Forecasting in the Western U.S. with Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07394/) (2018)
- [ArchesWeather: An efficient AI weather forecasting model at 1.5deg resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14527/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [U-Cast: A Surprisingly Simple and Efficient Frontier Probabilistic AI Weather Forecaster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09041/) (2026)
- [EO-VAE: Towards A Multi-sensor Tokenizer for Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12177/) (2026)
- [Probabilistic Transformers for Joint Modeling of Global Weather Dynamics and Decision-Centric Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03753/) (2026)
- [A Multimodal Vision Transformer-based Modeling Framework for Prediction of Fluid Flows in Energy Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02483/) (2026)
- [PuYun-LDM: A Latent Diffusion Model for High-Resolution Ensemble Weather Forecasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11807/) (2026)
- [Symmetric Composition of Anisotropic Operators for Global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Climate Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15040/) (2026)
- [RealBench: Benchmarking Data-Driven Numerical Weather Forecasting Under Operational Conditions and Extreme Event Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24945/) (2026)
- [Less Tokens, Better Forecasts: Sparse Residual Routing for Efficient Weather Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02829/) (2026)
- [Timestep-Conditioned Transformers for Global Weather Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06241/) (2026)
- [A Station-Based Evaluation of Machine Learning-based Weather Forecasting Models in Northern Norway](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10564/) (2026)
- [Physics-Guided Flow-Map Matching for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37487/) (2026)
- [S2S-JEPA: Predicting the Predictable at Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Timescales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03106/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate weather forecasting across time scales is critical for anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Recent data-driven methods based on deep learning have achieved significant success in the medium range, but struggle at longer subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) horizons due to error accumulation in their autoregressive approach. In this work, we propose OmniCast, a scalable and skillful probabilistic model that unifies weather forecasting across timescales. OmniCast consists of two components: a VAE model that encodes raw weather data into a continuous, lower-dimensional latent space, and a diffusion-based transformer model that generates a sequence of future latent tokens given the initial conditioning tokens. During training, we mask random future tokens and train the transformer to estimate their distribution given conditioning and visible tokens using a per-token diffusion head. During inference, the transformer generates the full sequence of future tokens by iteratively unmasking random subsets of tokens. This joint sampling across space and time mitigates compounding errors from autoregressive approaches. The low-dimensional latent space enables modeling long sequences of future latent states, allowing the transformer to learn weather dynamics beyond initial conditions. OmniCast performs competitively with leading probabilistic methods at the medium-range timescale while being 10x to 20x faster, and achieves state-of-the-art performance at the subseasonal-to-seasonal scale across accuracy, physics-based, and probabilistic metrics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that OmniCast can generate stable rollouts up to 100 years ahead. Code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/tung-nd/omnicast.