Max Defez, Filippo Quarenghi, Mathieu Vrac, Stephan Mandt, Tom Beucler
Deep-learning video super-resolution has progressed rapidly, but climate applications typically super-resolve (increase resolution) either space or time, and joint spatiotemporal models are often designed for a single pair of super-resolution (SR) factors (upscaling spatial and temporal ratio between the low-resolution sequence and the high-resolution sequence), limiting transfer across spatial resolutions and temporal cadences (frame rates). We present a scale-adaptive framework that reuses the same architecture across factors by decomposing spatiotemporal SR into a deterministic prediction of the conditional mean, with attention, and a residual conditional diffusion model, with an optional mass-conservation (same precipitation amount in inputs and outputs) transform to preserve aggregated totals. Assuming that larger SR factors primarily increase underdetermination (hence required context and residual uncertainty) rather than changing the conditional-mean structure, scale adaptivity is achieved by retuning three factor-dependent hyperparameters before retraining: the diffusion noise schedule amplitude beta (larger for larger factors to increase diversity), the temporal context length L (set to maintain comparable attention horizons across cadences) and optionally a third, the mass-conservation function f (tapered to limit the amplification of extremes for large factors). Demonstrated on reanalysis precipitation over France (Comephore), the same architecture spans super-resolution factors from 1 to 25 in space and 1 to 6 in time, yielding a reusable architecture and tuning recipe for joint spatiotemporal super-resolution across scales.
Omer Nivron, Damon J. Wischik, Mathieu Vrac, Emily Shuckburgh, Alex T. Archibald
Climate models are biased with respect to real-world observations. They usually need to be adjusted before being used in impact studies. The suite of statistical methods that enable such adjustments is called bias correction (BC). However, BC methods currently struggle to adjust temporal biases. Because they mostly disregard the dependence between consecutive time points. As a result, climate statistics with long-range temporal properties, such as heatwave duration and frequency, cannot be corrected accurately. This makes it more difficult to produce reliable impact studies on such climate statistics. This paper offers a novel BC methodology to correct temporal biases. This is made possible by rethinking the philosophy behind BC. We will introduce BC as a time-indexed regression task with stochastic outputs. Rethinking BC enables us to adapt state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) attention models and thereby learn different types of biases, including temporal asynchronicities. With a case study of heatwave duration statistics in Abuja, Nigeria, and Tokyo, Japan, we show more accurate results than current climate model outputs and alternative BC methods.
Alberto Bernacchia, Philippe Naveau, Mathieu Vrac, Pascal Yiou
The spatial coherence of a measured variable (e.g. temperature or pressure) is often studied to determine the regions where this variable varies the most or to find teleconnections, i.e. correlations between specific regions. While usual methods to find spatial patterns, such as Principal Components Analysis (PCA), are constrained by linear symmetries, the dependence of variables such as temperature or pressure at different locations is generally nonlinear. In particular, large deviations from the sample mean are expected to be strongly affected by such nonlinearities. Here we apply a newly developed nonlinear technique (Maxima of Cumulant Function, MCF) for the detection of typical spatial patterns that largely deviate from the mean. In order to test the technique and to introduce the methodology, we focus on the El Nino/Southern Oscillation and its spatial patterns. We find nonsymmetric temperature patterns corresponding to El Nino and La Nina, and we compare the results of MCF with other techniques, such as the symmetric solutions of PCA, and the nonsymmetric solutions of Nonlinear PCA (NLPCA). We found that MCF solutions are more reliable than the NLPCA fits, and can capture mixtures of principal components. Finally, we apply Extreme Value Theory on the temporal variations extracted from our methodology. We find that the tails of the distribution of extreme temperatures during La Nina episodes is bounded, while the tail during El Ninos is less likely to be bounded. This implies that the mean spatial patterns of the two phases are asymmetric, as well as the behaviour of their extremes.