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THOR: A Versatile Foundation Model for Earth Observation Climate and Society Applications

About

Current Earth observation foundation models are architecturally rigid, struggle with heterogeneous sensors and are constrained to fixed patch sizes. This limits their deployment in real-world scenarios requiring flexible computeaccuracy trade-offs. We propose THOR, a "computeadaptive" foundation model that solves both input heterogeneity and deployment rigidity. THOR is the first architecture to unify data from Copernicus Sentinel-1, -2, and -3 (OLCI & SLSTR) satellites, processing their native 10 m to 1000 m resolutions in a single model. We pre-train THOR with a novel randomized patch and input image size strategy. This allows a single set of pre-trained weights to be deployed at inference with any patch size, enabling a dynamic trade-off between computational cost and feature resolution without retraining. We pre-train THOR on THOR Pretrain, a new, large-scale multi-sensor dataset and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on downstream benchmarks, particularly in data-limited regimes like the PANGAEA 10% split, validating that THOR's flexible feature generation excels for diverse climate and society applications.

Theodor Forgaard, Jarle H. Reksten, Anders U. Waldeland, Valerio Marsocci, Nicolas Long\'ep\'e, Michael Kampffmeyer, Arnt-B{\o}rre Salberg• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Semantic segmentationSen1Floods11 (test)
mIoU90.14
33
Semantic segmentationSN-7-TS (test)
mIoU60.61
24
Semantic segmentationPASTIS (test)
mIoU40.76
22
Semantic segmentationCropMap (test)
mIoU60.75
19
Semantic segmentationPangaea Aggregate (test)
Average Rank8.33
19
Semantic segmentationPangaea 10% (train)
HLS Burns77.29
19
Semantic segmentationDynEarthNet (test)
mIoU37.57
19
Semantic segmentationAI4Farms (test)
mIoU26.91
19
Semantic segmentationMADOS (test)
mIoU0.5382
19
Semantic segmentationHLS Burns (test)
mIoU79.65
19
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