  Hybrid modeling combining data-driven techniques and numerical methods is an
emerging and promising research direction for efficient climate simulation.
However, previous works lack practical platforms, making developing hybrid
modeling a challenging programming problem. Furthermore, the lack of standard
data sets and evaluation metrics may hamper researchers from comprehensively
comparing various algorithms under a uniform condition. To address these
problems, we propose a framework called NeuroClim for hybrid modeling under the
real-world scenario, a basic setting to simulate the real climate that we live
in. NeuroClim consists of three parts: (1) Platform. We develop a user-friendly
platform NeuroGCM for efficiently developing hybrid modeling in climate
simulation. (2) Dataset. We provide an open-source dataset for data-driven
methods in hybrid modeling. We investigate the characteristics of the data,
i.e., heterogeneity and stiffness, which reveals the difficulty of regressing
climate simulation data; (3) Metrics. We propose a methodology for
quantitatively evaluating hybrid modeling, including the approximation ability
of machine learning models and the stability during simulation. We believe that
NeuroClim allows researchers to work without high level of climate-related
expertise and focus only on machine learning algorithm design, which will
accelerate hybrid modeling research in the AI-Climate intersection. The codes
and data are released at https://github.com/x-w19/NeuroClim.
