DiffDA: a diffusion model for weather-scale data assimilation

The generation of initial conditions via accurate data assimilation is crucial for reliable weather forecasting and climate modeling. We propose the DiffDA as a machine learning based data assimilation method capable of assimilating atmospheric variables using predicted states and sparse observations. We adapt the pretrained GraphCast weather forecast model as a denoising diffusion model. Our method applies two-phase conditioning: on the predicted state during both training and inference, and on sparse observations during inference only. As a byproduct, this strategy also enables the post-processing of predictions into the future, for which no observations are available.Through experiments based on a reanalysis dataset, we have verified that our method can produce assimilated global atmospheric data consistent with observations at 0.25degree resolution. The experiments also show that the initial conditions that are generated via our approach can be used for forecast models with a loss of lead time of at most 24 hours when compared to initial conditions of state-of-the-art data assimilation suites. This enables to apply the method to real world applications such as the creation of reanalysis datasets with autoregressive data assimilation.