On the Integration of Spatial-Temporal Knowledge: A Lightweight Approach to Atmospheric Time Series Forecasting

Yisong Fu, Fei Wang, Zezhi Shao, Boyu Diao, Lin Wu, Zhulin An, Chengqing Yu, Yujie Li, Yongjun Xu

Keywords: Atmospheric Time Series Forecasting; Spatial-Temporal Position Embedding; Spatial-Temporal Correlations

Abstract: Transformers have gained attention in atmospheric time series forecasting (ATSF) for their ability to capture global spatial-temporal correlations. However, their complex architectures lead to excessive parameter counts and extended training times, limiting their scalability to large-scale forecasting. In this paper, we revisit ATSF from a theoretical perspective of atmospheric dynamics and uncover a key insight: spatial-temporal position embedding (STPE) can inherently model spatial-temporal correlations even without attention mechanisms. Its effectiveness arises from integrating geographical coordinates and temporal features, which are intrinsically linked to atmospheric dynamics. Based on this, we propose **STELLA**, a **S**patial-**T**emporal knowledge **E**mbedded **L**ightweight mode**L** for ASTF, utilizing only STPE and an MLP architecture in place of Transformer layers. With 10k parameters and one hour of training, STELLA achieves superior performance on five datasets compared to other advanced methods. The paper emphasizes the effectiveness of spatial-temporal knowledge integration over complex architectures, providing novel insights for ATSF.

Primary Area: Machine learning for sciences (e.g. climate, health, life sciences, physics, social sciences)

Submission Number: 9799