Physics-coupled Adversarial Learning for Downscaling Extreme Rainfall

December 11, 2022

Modeling the risk of extreme weather events in a changing climate is essential for developing effective adaptation and mitigation strategies. Although the available low-resolution climate models capture different scenarios, accurate risk assessment for mitigation and adaption often demands detail that they typically cannot resolve. Here, we develop a dynamic data-driven downscaling (super-resolution) method that incorporates physics and statistics in a generative framework to learn the fine-scale spatial details of rainfall. Our method transforms coarse-resolution (0.25×0.25) climate model outputs into high-resolution (0.01×0.01) rainfall fields while efficaciously quantifying uncertainty. Results indicate that the downscaled rainfall fields closely match observed spatial fields and their risk distributions.

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