Poster
in
Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Fostering the Maturity of ML Applications for Climate Change
A Benchmark Dataset for Meteorological Downscaling
Michael Langguth · Paula Harder · Irene Schicker · Ankit Patnala · Sebastian Lehner · Konrad Mayer · Markus Dabernig
High spatial resolution in atmospheric representations is crucial across Earth science domains, but global reanalysis datasets like ERA5 often lack the detail to capture local phenomena due to their coarse resolution. Recent efforts have leveraged deep neural networks from computer vision to enhance the spatial resolution of meteorological data, showing promise for statistical downscaling. However, methodological diversity and insufficient comparisons with traditional downscaling techniques challenge these advancements. Our study introduces a benchmark dataset for statistical downscaling, utilizing ERA5 and the finer-resolution COSMO-REA6, to facilitate direct comparisons of downscaling methods for 2m temperature, global (solar) irradiance and 100m wind fields. Accompanying U-Net, GAN, and transformer models with a suite of evaluation metrics aim to standardize assessments and promote transparency and confidence in applying deep learning to meteorological downscaling.