Foundation models for geoscience
2024-11-14 — 2025-07-24
Wherein planetary-scale geoscience foundation models are surveyed, and Prithvi‑V2’s temporal “video” input for multi‑temporal change detection using harmonized Landsat‑Sentinel data is noted.
Foundation models for the whole planet, as opposed to classical NNs or classical geospatial techniques.
I’m currently project lead for a CSIRO Geospatial Foundation Model research program, which means I know quite a lot about this, but I have little time to blog about it—yet.
1 Popular Geospatial Foundation Models (as of mid-2025)
The three most relevant, state-of-the-art models for our tasks are Prithvi-V2, Clay, and SatlasPretrain. Each represents a different strategic choice in terms of data, scale, and ecosystem. I’m focussing here on satellite-observation models, but there are others.
Feature | Prithvi-V2 (IBM/NASA) | Clay | SatlasPretrain (Allen AI) |
---|---|---|---|
Core Architecture & Size | |||
Training Data | |||
Required Bands | |||
Geographic Suitability (Australia) | |||
Applicability to Inundation | |||
Applicability to Burn Scar | |||
Ease of Use (on our 4x H100) | |||
Key Differentiator | Temporal Focus. Designed from the ground up for multi-temporal change detection. | Spectral Focus. Leverages more Sentinel-2 bands for tasks sensitive to specific spectral signatures. | Scale & Generalization. Trained on an unmatched diversity and volume of data; the most powerful general-purpose feature extractor. |
2 Modelling governing equations
See foundation models for PDEs and Schmude et al. (2024). For example, Prithvi WxC is a weather-model surrogate, infilling “earth systems models”.
3 Incoming
DeepMind’s AlphaEarth is out! See Alice Heiman’s story about it (Brown et al. 2025)
Using Foundation Models for Earth Observation — Development Seed (interesting model comparison)
IBM and NASA’s Prithvi project has several models within it (Jakubik et al. 2023; Schmude et al. 2024; Szwarcman et al. 2025)
- NASA-IMPACT/Prithvi-EO-2.0: This repository contains details of the release of the Prithvi-EO-2.0 foundation model.
- IBM and NASA are building an AI foundation model for weather and climate - IBM Research
- NASA and IBM Openly Release Geospatial AI Foundation Model for NASA Earth Observation Data | NASA Earthdata
- Prithvi EO 2.0 BurnScars Demo - a Hugging Face Space by ibm-nasa-geospatial
An AWS marketing piece that walks through a workflow helpfully