Abstract
Long-term analysis of climate trends and patterns relies on continuous
and high-frequency observation data sets. Still, due to limitations in
historical meteorological observation techniques and national policies,
most weather stations worldwide can only provide three, four, or eight
observations per day, hindering climate change research progress. To
solve the problem of low-frequency daily observation in part of global
meteorological stations, we propose a time-downscaling model of
observation series based on deep learning, Land Surface Observation
Simulator-Time Series Version (LOS-T), taking 2m air temperature as an
example. LOS-T, combined with multimodal technology and Transformer
architecture, effectively merges multiple types of data, including
low-frequency observations, ERA5-land, and geographic information, to
convert low-frequency observations into hourly high-frequency
observations. The model showed significant accuracy improvements by
training on millions of meteorological observations worldwide,
especially on downscaling the data, which only has three observations
per day. The results showed that LOS-T substantially improved over
baseline models such as Bilinear and vanilla Transformer on several
metrics such as MAE, RMSE, COR, and R2. In addition, case studies have
confirmed that LOS-T can effectively utilize ERA5-land’s high-frequency
temperature change information to improve the accuracy and robustness of
predictions, even when there is a significant deviation between
ERA5-land data and Ground Truth. In short, LOS-T provides new ways to
refine global meteorological observation data and helps advance climate
science.