Downscaling Extreme Rainfall Using Physical-Statistical Generative Adversarial Learning
This addresses the need for detailed rainfall data in climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, representing an incremental improvement by combining physics and statistics in a generative framework.
The paper tackles the problem of downscaling low-resolution climate model outputs to high-resolution rainfall fields for accurate extreme weather risk assessment, achieving results that closely match observed spatial fields and risk distributions.
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 ($0.25^{\circ} \times 0.25^{\circ}$) climate model outputs into high-resolution ($0.01^{\circ} \times 0.01^{\circ}$) rainfall fields while efficaciously quantifying uncertainty. Results indicate that the downscaled rainfall fields closely match observed spatial fields and their risk distributions.