Aurora 1.5: Extending open foundation models for weather and Earth-system applications

At a glance Aurora 1.5 is a major extension of Microsoft’s Aurora Earth System foundation model that adds 22 more weather variables relevant to energy, agriculture, transport, and climate risk, along with hourly temporal resolution and probabilistic ensemble forecasting. Released as open source on GitHub with model checkpoints on Hugging Face, Aurora 1.5 enables researchers and developers to use, evaluate, and build on the model. Aurora 1.5 connects open research to Microsoft Weather services, linking the model wit