Spatiotemporally Coherent Probabilistic Generation of Weather from Climate

Local climate information is crucial for impact assessment and decision-making, yet coarse global climate simulations cannot capture small-scale phenomena. Current statistical downscaling methods infer these phenomena as temporally decoupled spatial patches. However, to preserve physical properties, estimating spatio-temporally coherent high-resolution weather dynamics for multiple variables across long time horizons is crucial. We present a novel generative approach that uses a score-based diffusion model trained on high-resolution reanalysis data to capture the statistical properties of local weather dynamics. After training, we condition on coarse climate model data to generate weather patterns consistent with the aggregate information. As this inference task is inherently uncertain, we leverage the probabilistic nature of diffusion models and sample multiple trajectories. We evaluate our approach with high-resolution reanalysis information before applying it to the climate model downscaling task. We then demonstrate that the model generates spatially and temporally coherent weather dynamics that align with global climate output.

A multi-modal representation of El Niño Southern Oscillation Diversity

The El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is characterized by alternating periods of warm (El Ni\~no) and cold (La Ni\~na) sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) in the equatorial Pacific. Although El Ni\~no and La Ni\~na are well-defined climate patterns, no two events are alike. To date, ENSO diversity has been described primarily in terms of the longitudinal location of peak SSTA, used to define a bimodal classification of events in Eastern Pacific (EP) and Central Pacific (CP) types. Here, we use low-dimensional representations of Pacific SSTAs to argue that binary categorical memberships are unsuitable to describe ENSO events. Using fuzzy unsupervised clustering, we recover the four known ENSO categories, along with a fifth category: an Extreme El Ni\~no. We show that Extreme El Ni\~nos differ both in their intensity and temporal evolution from canonical EP El Ni\~nos. We also find that CP La Ni\~nas, EP El Ni\~nos, and Extreme El Ni\~nos contribute the most to interdecadal ENSO variability.