Artificial Intelligence · 13.08.2026, 09:25 UTC
Earth observation embeddings are effective sub-grid descriptors for probabilistic weather downscaling
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.LG ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 13.08.2026 UTC |
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arXiv:2608.12271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global weather reanalyses and forecasts resolve the evolving atmospheric state on coarse grids, but site-specific applications require predictions at arbitrary locations where near-surface conditions also depend on unresolved terrain and land-surface properties. Existing probabilistic downscalers address this gap using hand-crafted topographic descriptors. We ask instead whether Earth observation foundation models can provide transferable sub-grid surface representations for probabilistic weather downscaling. We augment a convolutional conditional neural process that downscales coarse ERA5 reanalysis fields at ~25 km resolution with a learned local surface descriptor, obtained by compressing a patch of TESSERA embeddings at 10 m resolution. Although these embeddings summarise surface conditions over annual timescales, they improve downscaling of instantaneous 2 m temperature and 10 m wind speed by encoding persistent surface properties that capture a location's departure from the coarse-grid atmospheric state. Across five climatically diverse regions, the embedding improves point and probabilistic skill at stations held out in both space and time, overall improving CRPS skill by 11.5% for 2 m temperature and 6.2% for 10 m wind speed. We further analyse how its contribution differs by variable, finding that topography explains more of temperature's sub-grid structure, while TESSERA provides additional surface information for wind speed. These improvements persist when the coarse input is changed from ERA5 to forecasts from …