The impacts of climate change are felt by most critical systems, such as infrastructure, ecological systems, and power-plants. However, contemporary Earth System Models (ESM) are run at spatial resolutions too coarse for assessing effects this localized. Local scale projections can be obtained using statistical downscaling, a technique which uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping. Depending on statistical modeling choices, downscaled projections have been shown to vary significantly terms of accuracy and reliability. The spatio-temporal nature of the climate system motivates the adaptation of super-resolution image processing techniques to statistical downscaling. In our work, we present DeepSD, a generalized stacked super resolution convolutional neural network (SRCNN) framework for statistical downscaling of climate variables. DeepSD augments SRCNN with multi-scale input channels to maximize predictability in statistical downscaling. We provide a comparison with Bias Correction Spatial Disaggregation as well as three Automated-Statistical Downscaling approaches in downscaling daily precipitation from 1 degree (~100km) to 1/8 degrees (~12.5km) over the Continental United States. Furthermore, a framework using the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) platform is discussed for downscaling more than 20 ESM models with multiple emission scenarios.
Original Source [2]
Links:
[1] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/feature-article/deepsd-generating-high-resolution-climate-change-projections-through-single-image
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03126
[3] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/author/thomas-vandal
[4] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/author/evan-kodra
[5] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/author/sangram-ganguly-et-al
[6] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/climate-change
[7] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/remote-sensing
[8] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/climate-science
[9] http://admin.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/category/thesaurus/climate-impacts