Abstract
Climate models face limitations in their ability to accurately represent
highly variable atmospheric phenomena. To resolve fine-scale physical
processes, allowing for local impact assessments, downscaling techniques
are essential. We propose spateGAN, a novel approach for spatio-temporal
downscaling of precipitation data using conditional generative
adversarial networks. Our method is based on a video super-resolution
approach and trained on ten years of country wide radar observations for
Germany. It simultaneously increases the spatial and temporal resolution
of coarsened precipitation observations from 32 km to
2 km and from 1 hour to 10 minutes. Our experiments
indicate that the ensembles of generated temporally consistent rainfall
fields are in high agreement with the observational data. Spatial
structures with plausible advection were accurately generated. Compared
to trilinear interpolation and a classical convolutional neural network,
the generative model reconstructs the resolution-dependent extreme value
distribution with high skill. It showed a high Fractions Skill Score of
0.73 for rainfall intensities over
15mmh-1 and a low BIAS of
3.55%. A power spectrum analysis confirmed that the
probabilistic downscaling ability of our model further increased its
skill. We observed that neural network predictions may be interspersed
by recurrent structures not related to rainfall climatology, which
should be a known issue for future studies. We were able to mitigate
them by using an appropriate model architecture and model selection
process. Our findings suggest that spateGAN offers the potential to
complement and further advance the development of climate model
downscaling techniques, due to its performance and computational
efficiency.