Latent Representations of Land–Sea Boundaries and Extreme Temperature in Aurora’s Encoder (Student Abstract)

Abstract

Deep learning models are emerging as strong alternatives to numerical weather prediction, yet their internal representations remain poorly understood. We analyze the latent space of Microsoft’s Aurora model to test whether its embed- dings align with known physical processes. First, we show that land–sea distinctions are strongly captured, with errors mainly at coastlines. Second, we examine extreme surface temperatures using percentile-based thresholds, finding that embeddings reveal a gradient from moderate to severe events, though recall degrades at the rarest percentiles. These results suggest that Aurora’s encoder encodes physically consistent features but underestimates rare extremes. Our study combines deep learning forecasting, interpretable representation learning, and classical ML probing, illustrating how cross-disciplinary AI methods can yield insight into foundation models