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Project Aurora: The first large-scale foundation model of the atmosphere
Aurora is a foundation model developed by Microsoft Research that forecasts a wide range of environmental events. Microsoft says that it comes at a lower computational cost than traditional numerical forecasting and can have greater precision and speed.
Because it is a foundation model, Aurora is not limited to just AI weather forecasting. It has more than a billion parameters and can handle a wide range of prediction tasks, even in data-sparse areas. It can be specialised to go beyond traditional weather forecasting, such as for predicting air pollution, waves or even tropical cyclones.
“ We’ re not putting in strict rules about how we think variables should interact with each other,” says Megan Stanley, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research AI for Science.“ We’ re just giving a large deep-learning model the option to learn whatever is most useful. This is the power of deep learning in these kinds of simulation problems.”
Although initially training Aurora is costly, a study titled A foundation model for the Earth system published in Nature found that its operational expenses are significantly lower than those of traditional weather systems once it is fully functional.
90 October 2025