CLLMate: A Multimodal LLM for Weather and Climate Events Forecasting

Forecasting weather and climate events is crucial for making appropriate measures to mitigate environmental hazards and minimize associated losses. Previous research on environmental forecasting focuses on predicting numerical meteorological variables related to closed-set events rather than forecasting open-set events directly, which limits the comprehensiveness of event forecasting. We propose Weather and Climate Event Forecasting (WCEF), a new task that leverages meteorological raster data and textual event data to predict potential weather and climate events. However, due to difficulties in aligning multimodal data and the lack of sufficient supervised datasets, this task is challenging to accomplish. Therefore, we first propose a framework to align historical meteorological data with past weather and climate events using the large language model (LLM). In this framework, we construct a knowledge graph by using LLM to extract information about weather and climate events from a corpus of over 41k highly environment-focused news articles. Subsequently, we mapped these events with meteorological raster data, creating a supervised dataset, which is the largest and most novel for LLM tuning on the WCEF task. Finally, we introduced our aligned models, CLLMate (LLM for climate), a multimodal LLM to forecast weather and climate events using meteorological raster data. In evaluating CLLMate, we conducted extensive experiments. The results indicate that CLLMate surpasses both the baselines and other multimodal LLMs, showcasing the potential of utilizing LLM to align weather and climate events with meteorological data and highlighting the promising future for research on the WCEF task.