Satellite Observations Guided Diffusion Model for Accurate Meteorological States at Arbitrary Resolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces SGD, a diffusion model that leverages satellite data and attention mechanisms to accurately downscale meteorological states to arbitrary resolutions, improving weather prediction precision.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel satellite-guided diffusion model with a zero-shot sampling strategy and patch-based methods for high-resolution meteorological downscaling.

Findings

Achieves accurate downscaling to 6.25km resolution.

Outperforms existing methods in aligning with actual observations.

Utilizes attention mechanism for better satellite data integration.

Abstract

Accurate acquisition of surface meteorological conditions at arbitrary locations holds significant importance for weather forecasting and climate simulation. Due to the fact that meteorological states derived from satellite observations are often provided in the form of low-resolution grid fields, the direct application of spatial interpolation to obtain meteorological states for specific locations often results in significant discrepancies when compared to actual observations. Existing downscaling methods for acquiring meteorological state information at higher resolutions commonly overlook the correlation with satellite observations. To bridge the gap, we propose Satellite-observations Guided Diffusion Model (SGD), a conditional diffusion model pre-trained on ERA5 reanalysis data with satellite observations (GridSat) as conditions, which is employed for sampling downscaled meteorological states through a zero-shot guided sampling strategy and patch-based methods. During the training process, we propose to fuse the information from GridSat satellite observations into ERA5 maps via the attention mechanism, enabling SGD to generate atmospheric states that align more accurately with actual conditions. In the sampling, we employed optimizable convolutional kernels to simulate the upscale process, thereby generating high-resolution ERA5 maps using low-resolution ERA5 maps as well as observations from weather stations as guidance. Moreover, our devised patch-based method promotes SGD to generate meteorological states at arbitrary resolutions. Experiments demonstrate SGD fulfills accurate meteorological states downscaling to 6.25km.