2025/02/14 by Mierk Schwabe, Schwabe, Mierk, Lorenzo Pastori +15 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Computational Physics and Python Applications #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Scientific Computing and Data Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.10488
openalex publication_date 2025/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Adaptation to climate change requires robust climate projections, yet the uncertainty in these projections performed by ensembles of Earth system models (ESMs) remains large. This is mainly due to uncertainties in the representation of subgrid-scale processes such as turbulence or convection that are partly alleviated at higher resolution. New developments in machine learning-based hybrid ESMs demonstrate great potential for systematically reduced errors compared to traditional ESMs. Building on the work of hybrid (physics + AI) ESMs, we here discuss the additional potential of further improving and accelerating climate models with quantum computing. We discuss how quantum computers could accelerate climate models by solving the underlying differential equations faster, how quantum machine learning could better represent subgrid-scale phenomena in ESMs even with currently available noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, how quantum algorithms aimed at solving optimisation problems could assist in tuning the many parameters in ESMs, a currently time-consuming and challenging process, and how quantum computers could aid in the analysis of climate models. We also discuss hurdles and obstacles facing current quantum computing paradigms. Strong interdisciplinary collaboration between climate scientists and quantum computing experts could help overcome these hurdles and harness the potential of quantum computing for this urgent topic.