Forecasting Earth Surface Change in Embedding Space

Jingtao Li, Sadiq Jaffer, Anil Madhavapeddy, Pedro Sousa, Anthony Ortiz +5

Repeated satellite imagery permits understanding of how our planet changes over time, letting us predict its future and plan mitigating actions. Most existing studies that rely on a time series of satellite observations forecast the spectral values at each pixel for a future target date. However, clouds, shadows, and sensor noise often corrupt these observations, so that spectral forecasters waste much of their capacity on low-level features or noise rather than real change. With the advent of Earth foundation models, we argue that forecasting in embedding space is a feasible and more effective alternative. To this end, we design a token space that handles irregular histories from different sensors and foundation models and supports forecasts at any query date. Tokens from this space are inputs to our proposed forecaster, E$^2$Forecast, which is a transformer with two branches: a Gaussian branch that directly predicts a mean point forecast and per-dimension standard deviations, and a rectified-flow branch that generates forecast ensembles. On Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 benchmarks, forecasting embeddings instead of spectral values halves the cosine distance (from 0.20 to 0.10) and…