AlphaEarth Climate Monitoring System: High-Resolution Climate Monitoring with Foundation Models

This paper introduces the AlphaEarth Climate Monitoring System, a high-resolution framework for climate and environmental monitoring built on DeepMind’s AlphaEarth foundation model. The system integrates multi-modal Earth observation data including Sentinel-2 optical imagery, Sentinel-1 radar, LiDAR, and ERA5 climate reanalysis to generate compact 64-dimensional embeddings at 10 m resolution for continuous spatio-temporal monitoring. The study shows that foundation-model-driven embeddings outperform traditional methods in deforestation detection, urban heat anomaly mapping, agricultural drought assessment, and flood mapping. Results indicate higher accuracy, better recall, and reduced error compared to established baselines. The paper also addresses limitations such as data gaps and computational costs, and outlines future directions including incorporation of atmospheric and oceanic variables, near-real-time updates, and coupling with forecasting models. This work demonstrates the potential of geospatial foundation models to act as virtual satellites for planetary-scale, high-resolution climate intelligence.