In climate science and meteorology, high-resolution local precipitation (rain and snowfall) predictions are limited by the computational costs of simulation-based methods. Statistical downscaling, or super-resolution, is a common workaround where a low-resolution prediction is improved using statistical approaches. Unlike traditional computer vision tasks, weather and climate applications require capturing the accurate conditional distribution of high-resolution given low-resolution patterns to assure reliable ensemble averages and unbiased estimates of extreme events, such as heavy rain. This work extends recent video diffusion models to precipitation super-resolution, employing a deterministic downscaler followed by a temporally-conditioned diffusion model to capture noise characteristics and high-frequency patterns. We test our approach on FV3GFS output, an established large-scale global atmosphere model, and compare it against six state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis, capturing CRPS, MSE, precipitation distributions, and qualitative aspects using California and the Himalayas as examples, establishes our method as a new standard for data-driven precipitation downscaling.
Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology（印度热带气象研究所）；Indian Institute of Science Education and Research（印度科学教育与研究学院）；Indian Meteorological Department（印度气象局）；CIRES（环境科学合作研究所）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；NOAA/Physical Sciences Laboratory（美国国家海洋和大气管理局物理科学实验室）；Center for Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院大气与海洋科学中心）
Deep Learning (DL) based downscaling has become a popular tool in earth sciences recently. Increasingly, different DL approaches are being adopted to downscale coarser precipitation data and generate more accurate and reliable estimates at local (~few km or even smaller) scales. Despite several studies adopting dynamical or statistical downscaling of precipitation, the accuracy is limited by the availability of ground truth. A key challenge to gauge the accuracy of such methods is to compare the downscaled data to point-scale observations which are often unavailable at such small scales. In th…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts（欧洲中期天气预报中心）
Despite continuous improvements, precipitation forecasts are still not as accurate and reliable as those of other meteorological variables. A major contributing factor to this is that several key processes affecting precipitation distribution and intensity occur below the resolved scale of global weather models. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been demonstrated by the computer vision community to be successful at super-resolution problems, i.e., learning to add fine-scale structure to coarse images. Leinonen et al. (2020) previously applied a GAN to produce ensembles of reconstruct…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；British Antarctic Survey（英国南极调查局）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
A new model is presented for multisite statistical downscaling of temperature and precipitation using convolutional conditional neural processes (convCNPs). ConvCNPs are a recently developed class of models that allow deep learning techniques to be applied to off-the-grid spatio-temporal data. This model has a substantial advantage over existing downscaling methods in that the trained model can be used to generate multisite predictions at an arbitrary set of locations, regardless of the availability of training data. The convCNP model is shown to outperform an ensemble of existing downscaling …
Evaluating Cross-region Generalization for Wavelet-Diffusion Precipitation Downscaling
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）
Statistical Downscaling of Daily Precipitation from ERA5 Atmospheric Fields to IMERG over West Africa
Laboratoire d’Océanographie et des Sciences de l’Environnement et du Climat (LOSEC)Université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor（西古尔省阿萨内·塞克大学海洋与环境气候学实验室）；Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), Sorbonne Université, IRD（皮埃尔-西蒙·拉普拉斯研究所，索邦大学，法国国家科学研究中心）
RainScaleGAN: a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Rainfall Downscaling
Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies, CNR（意大利国家研究委员会应用数学与信息技术研究所）；Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, CNR（意大利国家研究委员会大气科学与气候研究所）；Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）
Generating High-Resolution Regional Precipitation Using Conditional Diffusion Model
School of Computing, KAIST（韩国科学技术院计算机学院）；Data Science Group, IBS（基础科学研究院数据科学组）；Department of Climate System, PNU（釜山大学气候系统系）；Center for Climate Physics, IBS（基础科学研究院气候物理中心）
Conditional diffusion models for downscaling and bias correction of Earth system model precipitation
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Munich Climate Center（慕尼黑气候中心）；TUM School of Engineering and Design（慕尼黑技术大学工程与设计学院）；Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research（波茨坦气候影响研究所）；Institute of Atmospheric Physics（大气物理研究所）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）
Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）
This study develops a neural network-based approach for emulating high-resolution modeled precipitation data with comparable statistical properties but at greatly reduced computational cost. The key idea is to use combination of low- and high- resolution simulations to train a neural network to map from the former to the latter. Specifically, we define two types of CNNs, one that stacks variables directly and one that encodes each variable before stacking, and we train each CNN type both with a conventional loss function, such as mean square error (MSE), and with a conditional generative adver…
Spatiotemporal Satellite Image Downscaling with Transfer Encoders and Autoregressive Generative Models
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学T.H. Chan公共卫生学院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；VA Healthcare System Boston, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs（美国退伍军人事务部波士顿医疗系统）
RainShift: A Benchmark for Precipitation Downscaling Across Geographies
Mila Quebec AI Institute（魁北克AI研究所）；European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts（欧洲中期天气预报中心）；Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning（卓越机器学习集群）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
本文提出 RainShift 数据集与基准，系统评估 GAN 和扩散模型等降尺度方法在跨地理分布偏移下的泛化能力，揭示分布外区域性能显著下降，并证明数据对齐可改善空间泛化，推动高分辨率气候信息的全球公平获取。
Research Institute for Infrastructure Paradigm Shift, Yachiyo Engineering Co., Ltd.（基础设施范式转换研究所，八千代工程株式会社）
Recently, flood damage has become a social problem owing to unexperienced weather conditions arising from climate change. An immediate response to heavy rain is important for the mitigation of economic losses and also for rapid recovery. Spatiotemporal precipitation forecasts may enhance the accuracy of dam inflow prediction, more than 6 hours forward for flood damage mitigation. However, the ordinary ConvLSTM has the limitation of predictable range more than 3-timesteps in real-world precipitation forecasting owing to the irreducible bias between target prediction and ground-truth value. This…
University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Jupiter Intelligence Inc.（木星智能公司）
Downscaling is a landmark task in climate science and meteorology in which the goal is to use coarse scale, spatio-temporal data to infer values at finer scales. Statistical downscaling aims to approximate this task using statistical patterns gleaned from an existing dataset of downscaled values, often obtained from observations or physical models. In this work, we investigate the application of deep latent variable learning to the task of statistical downscaling. We present ClimAlign, a novel method for unsupervised, generative downscaling using adaptations of recent work in normalizing flows…
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss（联邦气象和气候学办公室 MeteoSwiss）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been recently adopted for super-resolution, an application closely related to what is referred to as "downscaling" in the atmospheric sciences: improving the spatial resolution of low-resolution images. The ability of conditional GANs to generate an ensemble of solutions for a given input lends itself naturally to stochastic downscaling, but the stochastic nature of GANs is not usually considered in super-resolution applications. Here, we introduce a recurrent, stochastic super-resolution GAN that can generate ensembles of time-evolving high-resoluti…
Event-Aware Spatiotemporal Precipitation Forecasting with Geographic Context and Physics-Guided Regularization
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tangshan Research Institute, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学唐山研究院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
The Mediterranean is strongly affected by Extreme Precipitation Events (EPEs), sometimes leading to negative impacts on society, economy, and the environment. Understanding such natural hazards and their drivers is essential to mitigate related risks. Here, EPEs over the Mediterranean between 1979 and 2019 are analyzed, using ERA5 dataset from ECMWF. EPEs are determined based on the 99th percentile of the daily distribution (P99). The different EPE characteristics are assessed, based on seasonality and spatiotemporal dependencies. To better understand the connection to large-scale atmospheric …
Jackson School of Geosciences（杰克逊地球科学学院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校环境科学研究合作研究所）；NOAA/Physical Sciences Laboratory（美国国家海洋和大气管理局物理科学实验室）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；Cockrell School of Engineering（科克雷尔工程学院）
Urban downscaling is a link to transfer the knowledge from coarser climate information to city scale assessments. These high-resolution assessments need multiyear climatology of past data and future projections, which are complex and computationally expensive to generate using traditional numerical weather prediction models. The city of Austin, Texas, USA has seen tremendous growth in the past decade. Systematic planning for the future requires the availability of fine resolution city-scale datasets. In this study, we demonstrate a novel approach generating a general purpose operator using dee…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
AI-for-science approaches have been applied to solve scientific problems (e.g., nuclear fusion, ecology, genomics, meteorology) and have achieved highly promising results. Spatial precipitation downscaling is one of the most important meteorological problem and urgently requires the participation of AI. However, the lack of a well-organized and annotated large-scale dataset hinders the training and verification of more effective and advancing deep-learning models for precipitation downscaling. To alleviate these obstacles, we present the first large-scale spatial precipitation downscaling data…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；ClimateAI
Accurately forecasting extreme rainfall is notoriously difficult, but is also ever more crucial for society as climate change increases the frequency of such extremes. Global numerical weather prediction models often fail to capture extremes, and are produced at too low a resolution to be actionable, while regional, high-resolution models are hugely expensive both in computation and labour. In this paper we explore the use of deep generative models to simultaneously correct and downscale (super-resolve) global ensemble forecasts over the Continental US. Specifically, using fine-grained radar o…
Global spatio-temporal downscaling of ERA5 precipitation through generative AI
Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research - Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU)（气象与气候研究所——大气环境研究（IMK-IFU））；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research - Atmospheric Trace Gases and Remote Sensing (IMK-ASF)（气象与气候研究所——大气痕量气体与遥感（IMK-ASF））；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）
Field Science Education and Research Center (FSERC), Kyoto University（京都大学 田野科学教育研究中心（FSERC））；Center for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Education and Research, Kyoto University（京都大学 跨学科教育研究推进中心）
Analyzing and utilizing spatiotemporal big data are essential for studies concerning climate change. However, such data are not fully integrated into climate models owing to limitations in statistical frameworks. Herein, we employ VARENN (visually augmented representation of environment for neural networks) to efficiently summarize monthly observations of climate data for 1901-2016 into 2-dimensional graphical images. Using red, green, and blue channels of color images, three different variables are simultaneously represented in a single image. For global datasets, models were trained via conv…
Precipitation is a key part of hydrological circulation and is a sensitive indicator of climate change. The Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission (IMERG) datasets are widely used for global and regional precipitation investigations. However, their local application is limited by the relatively coarse spatial resolution. Therefore, in this paper, an attention mechanism based convolutional network (AMCN) is proposed to downscale GPM IMERG monthly precipitation data. The proposed method is an end-to-end network, which consists of a global cro…
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a mixture of air pollutants that has adverse effects on human health. Understanding the health effects of PM2.5 mixture and its individual species has been a research priority over the past two decades. However, the limited availability of speciated PM2.5 measurements continues to be a major challenge in exposure assessment for conducting large-scale population-based epidemiology studies. The PM2.5 species have complex spatial-temporal and cross dependence structures that should be accounted for in estimating the spatiotemporal distribution of each component.…
Natural spatiotemporal processes can be highly non-stationary in many ways, e.g. the low-level non-stationarity such as spatial correlations or temporal dependencies of local pixel values; and the high-level variations such as the accumulation, deformation or dissipation of radar echoes in precipitation forecasting. From Cramer's Decomposition, any non-stationary process can be decomposed into deterministic, time-variant polynomials, plus a zero-mean stochastic term. By applying differencing operations appropriately, we may turn time-variant polynomials into a constant, making the deterministi…
PixelFlowCast: Latent-Free Precipitation Nowcasting via Pixel Mean Flows
Department of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化系）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）
Projection of changes in extreme indices of climate variables such as temperature and precipitation are critical to assess the potential impacts of climate change on human-made and natural systems, including critical infrastructures and ecosystems. While impact assessment and adaptation planning rely on high-resolution projections (typically in the order of a few kilometers), state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs) are available at spatial resolutions of few hundreds of kilometers. Current solutions to obtain high-resolution projections of ESMs include downscaling approaches that consider …
Technological developments and open data policies have made large, global environmental datasets accessible to everyone. For analysing such datasets, including spatiotemporal correlations using traditional models based on Gaussian processes does not scale with data volume and requires strong assumptions about stationarity, separability, and distance measures of covariance functions that are often unrealistic for global data. Only very few modeling approaches suitably model spatiotemporal correlations while addressing both computational scalability as well as flexible covariance models. In this…
Precipitation nowcasting using neural networks and ground-based radars has become one of the key components of modern weather prediction services, but it is limited to the regions covered by ground-based radars. Truly global precipitation nowcasting requires fusion of radar and satellite observations. We propose the data fusion pipeline based on computer vision techniques, including novel inpainting algorithm with soft masking.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Observatory（香港天文台）
The goal of precipitation nowcasting is to predict the future rainfall intensity in a local region over a relatively short period of time. Very few previous studies have examined this crucial and challenging weather forecasting problem from the machine learning perspective. In this paper, we formulate precipitation nowcasting as a spatiotemporal sequence forecasting problem in which both the input and the prediction target are spatiotemporal sequences. By extending the fully connected LSTM (FC-LSTM) to have convolutional structures in both the input-to-state and state-to-state transitions, we …
Northeastern University（东北大学）；risQ Inc.（risQ公司）；Bay Area Environmental Research Institute（湾区环境研究所）；NASA Ames Research Center（NASA艾姆斯研究中心）；University Corporation（大学公司）；NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division（NASA高级超算部门）
The impacts of climate change are felt by most critical systems, such as infrastructure, ecological systems, and power-plants. However, contemporary Earth System Models (ESM) are run at spatial resolutions too coarse for assessing effects this localized. Local scale projections can be obtained using statistical downscaling, a technique which uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping. Depending on statistical modeling choices, downscaled projections have been shown to vary significantly terms of accuracy and reliability. The spatio-temporal nature…
DAWP: A framework for global observation forecasting via Data Assimilation and Weather Prediction in satellite observation space
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shanghai AI Laboratory（香港中文大学上海人工智能实验室）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
