From Weather to Enhanced Weathering: Weather Foundation Models for Carbon Dioxide Removal at Operational Scale

Sasankh Munukutla, Felipe Oviedo, Danrong Zhang, Kenji Takeda, Juan M Lavista Ferres

Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) is a carbon removal solution with the potential to remove gigatons of CO$_2$ per year, but quantifying that removal today requires dense soil sampling and laboratory analysis. We evaluate five weather Foundation Models (FMs) as frozen encoders feeding lightweight decoders, under a leave-one-field-out protocol on 5,192 chronosequences from 264 fields across Brazil and the US. To our knowledge, this is the first holistic evaluation of weather FMs for ERW and the largest evaluation on operational ERW data. We find that across weather FMs, representations transfer to ERW: our best model, TerraNova-ERW, built on Aurora 1.5, positively orders measurements within fields it has never seen. Zero-shot prediction of a new field's mean removal is not yet feasible, and we attribute this to data scale: the same architecture excels on $\sim$$10^5$ natural-weathering sequences, anchoring the scale we expect ERW data must reach. Few-shot prediction, blending the model with a few samples per field, is supported today: TerraNova-ERW recovers over 60% of the highest-removal fields with two samples per field, roughly halves the samples needed to estimate a field's mean…