As tropical cyclones intensify and track forecasts become increasingly uncertain, U.S. ports face heightened supply-chain risk under extreme weather conditions. Port operators need to rapidly synthesize diverse multimodal forecast products, such as probabilistic wind maps, track cones, and official advisories, into clear, actionable guidance as cyclones approach. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a powerful means to integrate these heterogeneous data sources alongside broader contextual knowledge, yet their accuracy and reliability in the specific context of port cyclone preparedness have not been rigorously evaluated. To fill this gap, we introduce CyPortQA, the first multimodal benchmark tailored to port operations under cyclone threat. CyPortQA assembles 2,917 real-world disruption scenarios from 2015 through 2023, spanning 145 U.S. principal ports and 90 named storms. Each scenario fuses multi-source data (i.e., tropical cyclone products, port operational impact records, and port condition bulletins) and is expanded through an automated pipeline into 117,178 structured question-answer pairs. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse MLLMs, including both open-source and proprietary model. MLLMs demonstrate great potential in situation understanding but still face considerable challenges in reasoning tasks, including potential impact estimation and decision reasoning.

Abstract--Accurate cyclone forecasting is essential for minimizing loss of life, infrastructure damage, and economic disruption. Traditional numerical weather prediction models, though effective, are computationally intensive and prone to error due to the chaotic nature of atmospheric systems. This study proposes a machine learning (ML) approach to forecasting tropical cyclone trajectory and status using time series data from the National Hurricane Center, including recently added best track wind radii. A two-stage ML pipeline is developed: a regression model first predicts cyclone features--maximum wind speed, minimum pressure, trajectory length, and directional change--using a sliding window of historical data. These outputs are then input into classification models to predict the cyclone's categorical status. Gradient boosting regression and three classifiers--random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)--are evaluated. After hyperparameter tuning and synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE), the RF classifier achieves the highest performance with 93% accuracy, outperforming SVM and MLP across precision, recall, and F1 score. The RF model is particularly robust in identifying minority cyclone statuses and minimizing false negatives. Regression results yield low mean absolute errors, with pressure and wind predictions within 2.2 mb and 2.4 kt, respectively. These findings demonstrate that ML models, especially ensemble-based classifiers, offer an effective, scalable alternative to traditional forecasting methods, with potential for real-time cyclone prediction and integration into decision-support systems.

Accurate forecasting of tropical cyclone (TC) intensity - particularly during periods of rapid intensification and rapid weakening - remains a challenge for operational meteorology, with high-stakes implications for disaster preparedness and infrastructure resilience. Recent advances in machine learning have yielded notable progress in TC prediction; however, most existing systems provide forecasts that degrade rapidly in extreme regimes and lack long-range consistency. Here we introduce TIFNet, a transformer-based forecasting model that generates non-iterative, 5-day intensity trajectories by integrating high-resolution global forecasts with a historical-evolution fusion mechanism. Trained on reanalysis data and fine-tuned with operational data, TIFNet consistently outperforms operational numerical models across all forecast horizons, delivering robust improvements across weak, strong, and super typhoon categories. In rapid intensity change regimes - long regarded as the most difficult to forecast - TIFNet reduces forecast error by 29-43% relative to current operational baselines. These results represent a substantial advance in artificial-intelligence-based TC intensity forecasting, especially under extreme conditions where traditional models consistently underperform.

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Cyclone rapid intensification is the rapid increase in cyclone wind intensity, exceeding a threshold of 30 knots, within 24 hours. Rapid intensification is considered an extreme event during a cyclone, and its occurrence is relatively rare, contributing to a class imbalance in the dataset. A diverse array of factors influences the likelihood of a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification, further complicating the task for conventional machine learning models. In this paper, we evaluate deep learning, ensemble learning and data augmentation frameworks to detect cyclone rapid intensification based on wind intensity and spatial coordinates. We note that conventional data augmentation methods cannot be utilised for generating spatiotemporal patterns replicating cyclones that undergo rapid intensification. Therefore, our framework employs deep learning models to generate spatial coordinates and wind intensity that replicate cyclones to address the class imbalance problem of rapid intensification. We also use a deep learning model for the classification module within the data augmentation framework to di fferentiate between rapid and non-rapid intensification events during a cyclone. Our results show that data augmentation improves the results for rapid intensification detection in cyclones, and spatial coordinates play a critical role as input features to the given models. This paves the way for research in synthetic data generation for spatiotemporal data with extreme events. Introduction Over the past decade, the impacts of climate change have manifested in an alarming increase in the strength of tropical cyclones, characterised by elevated levels of precipitation and wind intensity, resulting in devastating consequences on a global scale [1, 2, 3]. Rappaport et al. [4] defined rapid intensification as a sudden surge in wind intensity exceeding 30 knots (35 miles / hour or 55 kilometres / hour) within 24 hours [5]. Forecasting the rapid intensification of high-category cyclones (Category 4 and 5) poses greater challenges due to their infrequent occurrence, in contrast to lower-category cyclones[6].

Our planet is facing increasingly frequent extreme events, which pose major risks to human lives and ecosystems. Recent advances in machine learning (ML), especially with foundation models (FMs) trained on extensive datasets, excel in extracting features and show promise in disaster management. Nevertheless, these models often inherit biases from training data, challenging their performance over extreme values. To explore the reliability of FM in the context of extreme events, we introduce \textbf{ExE}Bench (\textbf{Ex}treme \textbf{E}arth Benchmark), a collection of seven extreme event categories across floods, wildfires, storms, tropical cyclones, extreme precipitation, heatwaves, and cold waves. The dataset features global coverage, varying data volumes, and diverse data sources with different spatial, temporal, and spectral characteristics. To broaden the real-world impact of FMs, we include multiple challenging ML tasks that are closely aligned with operational needs in extreme events detection, monitoring, and forecasting. ExEBench aims to (1) assess FM generalizability across diverse, high-impact tasks and domains, (2) promote the development of novel ML methods that benefit disaster management, and (3) offer a platform for analyzing the interactions and cascading effects of extreme events to advance our understanding of Earth system, especially under the climate change expected in the decades to come. The dataset and code are public https://github.com/zhaoshan2/EarthExtreme-Bench.

Mediterranean cyclones are extreme meteorological events of which much less is known compared to their tropical, oceanic counterparts. The raising interest in such phenomena is due to their impact on a region increasingly more affected by climate change, but a precise characterization remains a non trivial task. In this work we showcase how a Bayesian algorithm (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) can classify Mediterranean cyclones relying on wind velocity data, leading to a drastic dimensional reduction that allows the use of supervised statistical learning techniques for detecting and tracking new cyclones.

Local climate information is crucial for impact assessment and decision-making, yet coarse global climate simulations cannot capture small-scale phenomena. However, to preserve physical properties, estimating spatio-temporally coherent high-resolution weather dynamics for multiple variables across long time horizons is crucial. We present a novel generative approach that uses a score-based diffusion model trained on high-resolution reanalysis data to capture the statistical properties of local weather dynamics. After training, we condition on coarse climate model data to generate weather patterns consistent with the aggregate information. As this inference task is inherently uncertain, we leverage the probabilistic nature of diffusion models and sample multiple trajectories. We evaluate our approach with high-resolution reanalysis information before applying it to the climate model downscaling task. We then demonstrate that the model generates spatially and temporally coherent weather dynamics that align with global climate output. Numerical simulations based on the Navier-Stokes equations, discretized over time and space, are fundamental to understanding weather patterns, climate variability, and climate change. Stateof-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, which primarily focus on atmospheric processes, can accurately resolve small-scale dynamics within the Earth system, providing fine-scale spatial and temporal weather patterns at resolutions on the order of kilometers [1]. However, the substantial computational resources required for these models render them impractical for simulating the extended time scales associated with climatic changes. In contrast, Earth System Models (ESMs), such as those included in the CMIP6 project [2], incorporate a broader range of processes--including atmospheric, oceanic, and biogeochemical interactions--while operating on coarser spatial scales. This coarse resolution limits the ability of ESMs to fully capture small-scale processes, requiring parameterizations to represent unresolved dynamics as functions of resolved variables. This work introduces a probabilistic downscaling pipeline that jointly estimates spatio-temporally consistent weather dynamics from ESM simulations on multiple variables. The framework is built around a score-based diffusion model and can be understood as a combination of four modules, which can each be adjusted independently of the others. This schematic outlines the framework.