ORBIT-2 Dataset for Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling

This dataset release corresponds to the work conducted in ORBIT-2: Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling, where large-scale AI methods were applied to improve climate and weather resolution. The collection integrates four widely used, publicly available datasets: ERA5, PRISM, DAYMET, and IMERG. To prepare the data for ORBIT-2 model training and evaluation, we applied a preprocessing pipeline that generates paired low-resolution and high-resolution samples, enabling supervised downscaling experiments. The transformation from coarse to fine scales was performed using bilinear regridding, consistent with the procedures described in WeatherBench2, a community benchmark for weather and climate AI models. This dataset supports the development and evaluation of foundation models designed for weather and climate downscaling at exascale. Additional details on methodology and applications can be found in Wang et al., ORBIT-2 (arXiv:2505.04802, 2025).