Aurora's latent bottleneck is organized by season, not storms

Kasteleyn & Lucic run spatially-pooled PCA on Aurora's latent bottleneck (a 3D Swin Transformer V2 U-Net weather model), finding it organized primarily by seasonal cycle (PC1 24.1% variance, cosine stability 0.998 over 1000 bootstraps) [kasteleyn-lucic-2026-does-aurora-encode-atmospheric-structure] Extreme storm events do not form a linearly separable cluster (unstable PC3, mean cosine 0.650+/-0.269) [kasteleyn-lucic-2026-does-aurora-encode-atmospheric-structure] Layer-wise Relevance Propagation on the Great Storm of 1987 shows the model links surface wind to the ~150 hPa upper troposphere [kasteleyn-lucic-2026-does-aurora-encode-atmospheric-structure] Masking the top-1% LRP-relevant pixels degrades forecasts 3.31x more than random masking (MSE 5.30e4 vs 1.60e4), confirming causal relevance [kasteleyn-lucic-2026-does-aurora-encode-atmospheric-structure]