DiffScale: Continuous Downscaling and Bias Correction of Subseasonal Wind Speed Forecasts using Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Springenberg, Maximilian, Otero, Noelia, Xue, Yuxin, Ma, Jackie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Springenberg, Maximilian
Otero, Noelia
Xue, Yuxin
Ma, Jackie
author_facet Springenberg, Maximilian
Otero, Noelia
Xue, Yuxin
Ma, Jackie
contents Renewable resources are strongly dependent on local and large-scale weather situations. Skillful subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasts -- beyond two weeks and up to two months -- can offer significant socioeconomic advantages to the energy sector. This study aims to enhance wind speed predictions using a diffusion model with classifier-free guidance to downscale S2S forecasts of surface wind speed. We propose DiffScale, a diffusion model that super-resolves spatial information for continuous downscaling factors and lead times. Leveraging weather priors as guidance for the generative process of diffusion models, we adopt the perspective of conditional probabilities on sampling super-resolved S2S forecasts. We aim to directly estimate the density associated with the target S2S forecasts at different spatial resolutions and lead times without auto-regression or sequence prediction, resulting in an efficient and flexible model. Synthetic experiments were designed to super-resolve wind speed S2S forecasts from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) from a coarse resolution to a finer resolution of ERA5 reanalysis data, which serves as a high-resolution target. The innovative aspect of DiffScale lies in its flexibility to downscale arbitrary scaling factors, enabling it to generalize across various grid resolutions and lead times -without retraining the model- while correcting model errors, making it a versatile tool for improving S2S wind speed forecasts. We achieve a significant improvement in prediction quality, outperforming baselines up to week 3.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23893
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiffScale: Continuous Downscaling and Bias Correction of Subseasonal Wind Speed Forecasts using Diffusion Models
Springenberg, Maximilian
Otero, Noelia
Xue, Yuxin
Ma, Jackie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Renewable resources are strongly dependent on local and large-scale weather situations. Skillful subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasts -- beyond two weeks and up to two months -- can offer significant socioeconomic advantages to the energy sector. This study aims to enhance wind speed predictions using a diffusion model with classifier-free guidance to downscale S2S forecasts of surface wind speed. We propose DiffScale, a diffusion model that super-resolves spatial information for continuous downscaling factors and lead times. Leveraging weather priors as guidance for the generative process of diffusion models, we adopt the perspective of conditional probabilities on sampling super-resolved S2S forecasts. We aim to directly estimate the density associated with the target S2S forecasts at different spatial resolutions and lead times without auto-regression or sequence prediction, resulting in an efficient and flexible model. Synthetic experiments were designed to super-resolve wind speed S2S forecasts from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) from a coarse resolution to a finer resolution of ERA5 reanalysis data, which serves as a high-resolution target. The innovative aspect of DiffScale lies in its flexibility to downscale arbitrary scaling factors, enabling it to generalize across various grid resolutions and lead times -without retraining the model- while correcting model errors, making it a versatile tool for improving S2S wind speed forecasts. We achieve a significant improvement in prediction quality, outperforming baselines up to week 3.
title DiffScale: Continuous Downscaling and Bias Correction of Subseasonal Wind Speed Forecasts using Diffusion Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23893